Lighter vs Fomo

Lighter

A Standard account, the default, pays no maker or taker fee on perpetuals or spot. The trade-off is speed: Standard orders wait 300 ms before they reach the book, and the Premium account that removes most of that delay pays 0.028% taker and 0.004% maker before staking discounts. Plus accounts pay 0.005% for higher API rate limits. Advanced order types cost 0.01% on a Standard account.

Fomo

Spot trades cost 0.50% each on every network. On Solana a small-order ladder applies below 190 USDC, and on the other chains you also pay the network fee shown in the quote. Tokens the app marks as low fee cost 0.05%. The perps mode charges 0.05% of position size per trade on top of Hyperliquid's fee and funding. Every fee is shown before you confirm, and the Terms let Fomo change fees at any time.

Lighter

You connect a wallet and sign, with no identity check in the official interface. The Terms say the interface logs IP addresses only to enforce the access restrictions and collects no other personal data. The app applies the country list by IP: from a restricted location it shows a restricted-jurisdiction notice and marks the session geo-blocked.

Fomo

You sign up with an Apple ID, a Google account, or an email code, and Fomo creates a Solana wallet and an EVM wallet for you through Privy. There is no identity check to open the account or to trade, and the private keys can be exported from Settings at any time. Identity checks sit at the edges: the first withdrawal to a US bank account requires a government ID through Spritz, Fomo's payment partner. The Terms, dated August 17, 2026, reserve the right to require KYC for the perps mode, and the card and Apple Pay providers apply their own rules.

Lighter

The Terms, last updated December 29, 2025, name fourteen excluded countries: the US, Canada, the UK, China, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, Belarus, Myanmar, and Syria, plus any jurisdiction under comprehensive sanctions and anyone on a sanctions list. The interface applies the list by IP address. The separate Lighter on Robinhood Chain deployment also excludes Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE, and South Sudan.

Fomo

The Terms, dated August 17, 2026, bar residents, citizens, and anyone located in Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, and Yemen, plus the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions, any other country embargoed or sanctioned by the US, the UK, or the EU, and any jurisdiction where crypto trading is prohibited. Perps are not offered to US persons, a definition that includes US citizens living abroad, and Robinhood's stock and ETF tokens are also closed to residents of Canada, the UK, and Switzerland. Spot trading has no US exclusion. You must be 18, and using a VPN to get around any of this breaches the Terms.

Lighter

Maximum leverage is set per market: 50x for BTC and ETH, 25x for SOL, 20x for XRP, HYPE, and BNB, 15x for ARB and OP, 10x or less for most other coins, and 3x for the newest listings. Major FX pairs run up to 25x, gold 15x, silver 10x. You can lower the leverage on any market. Positions are cross-margined unless you set a market to isolated. Pre-launch markets are isolated only. With a Unified Trading Account, ETH and XAUT count as margin at a haircut.

Fomo

Leverage is picked in whole numbers up to a cap set per asset: 40x on BTC, 25x on ETH, 20x on SOL, and 10x on most altcoins. The caps for stock, index, and commodity perps are not published. Every position is isolated, so a liquidation costs only that position's margin, and you can add or remove margin on an open position. Collateral is USDC in a separate perps balance, moved in from the token balance (5 USDC minimum in, 2 USDC out), and the smallest position is 15 USDC notional. Liquidation, stop-loss, and take-profit all trigger on Hyperliquid's mark price, not the chart price. A triggered order fills as a market order with a 10% slippage allowance, and funding is paid or received every hour. The Terms warn that the protocol can auto-deleverage profitable positions and that non-crypto markets may lack an insurance fund.

Lighter

The contract specifications list about 100 crypto perpetuals, and the RWA specifications add roughly 70 more that trade around the clock: gold, silver, copper, oil, gas, FX pairs, US and Asian stocks, ETFs and indexes, and pre-IPO names such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Pre-IPO and pre-launch markets are isolated-margin only, and pre-IPO prices come from Lighter's own pricing mechanism rather than a market feed. A small spot book trades ETH, LIT, and a few other tokens against USDC. Order types: market, limit, stop-loss and take-profit in market or limit form, TWAP, chase limit, atomic basket orders, and RFQ for size, with post-only, reduce-only, good-til-time, and immediate-or-cancel options.

Fomo

Spot covers tokens on Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Monad, Ethereum, and Robinhood Chain, bought from one USDC balance with no bridging. The app labels each token verified, unverified, or with a warning, and Robinhood Chain carries Robinhood's US stock and ETF tokens, which are OTC derivatives issued by Robinhood Europe UAB rather than shares. Perps, launched June 11, 2026, cover everything listed on Hyperliquid and trade.xyz: crypto such as BTC, ETH, SOL, and HYPE, US stocks such as NVDA and GOOGL, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Kospi 200, and Nikkei 225, oil, gold, silver, copper, and natural gas, and pre-IPO markets including SpaceX. Perps orders are market orders with optional stop-loss and take-profit, and spot trades are instant buys and sells at the quoted price.

Lighter

Collateral is USDC. The direct route is a deposit from Ethereum mainnet into the exchange contract, minimum 1 USDC. Lighter's bridge, run with Fun.xyz, an independent provider, gives you a deposit address that accepts USDC, USDT, ETH, and other tokens from Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana, HyperEVM, Monad, Tron, and Bitcoin and credits USDC, with a $5 minimum for a new account ($3 from EVM chains and Solana afterwards, $10 from Bitcoin). The app's deposit notice also lists card and Coinbase deposits. ETH and XAUT can be deposited to the spot balance and, with a Unified Trading Account, posted as margin at a haircut.

Fomo

The Deposit screen offers four routes, and not every account sees all of them. A bank-issued debit card funds the USDC cash balance within a few minutes. Prepaid cards, Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Apple Cash are refused, and card availability follows the payment provider's country list. Apple Pay works two ways: on the card screen it funds the cash balance through Coinbase, with a weekly limit shown in the app, and Buy with Apple Pay purchases a single token directly through Crossmint, capped at 2,500 dollars a day. Pay with Coinbase draws on a Coinbase account. Crypto deposits take USDC on Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Monad, or Ethereum, and USDG on Robinhood Chain, which converts into the Solana USDC balance. The smallest deposit that credits is 15 USDC on Ethereum and 0.50 on Base, BNB Chain, Monad, and Robinhood Chain, with no minimum on Solana. The help center publishes no card fee. On the web you fund with crypto, and the web launch post says card and Apple Pay deposits are done in the mobile app.

Lighter

Two routes. A secure withdrawal is proven to Ethereum and then claimable there. Lighter says it usually claims on your behalf unless gas is high, and the minimum is 1 USDC. A fast withdrawal sends USDC to Arbitrum with a 4 USDC minimum. The docs do not publish the fee for either route, but the withdrawal screen shows it before you confirm.

Fomo

You withdraw USDC from the cash balance to any wallet or exchange address on Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Monad, or Ethereum, or USDG on Robinhood Chain, choosing the network to match the destination. The help center lists no withdrawal fee for these. Bank withdrawals go through Spritz and reach US bank accounts only, after a one-time ID check: the minimum is 5 dollars, a regular transfer takes 1 to 3 business days, and a same-day Fast option, for requests between 9 AM and 5 PM Eastern on a business day, carries an extra fee that is not published. Anything other than USDC leaves only by exporting the private key into another wallet, positions under 2 USDC (5 on Ethereum) cannot be sold in the app, and perps collateral has to move back to the token balance first.

Lighter

Joining through a referral link rebates the Premium trading fees you pay in your first week, on up to $10M of volume, paid out weekly. A Standard account pays no trading fee, so the benefit only matters if you opt into Premium. Referrers earn 10% to 30% of their referred users' fees. Rebates are discretionary, and the code cannot be changed after sign-up. No ChainScouter code is active.

Fomo

Signing up through another user's link, fomo.family/r/ followed by their username, takes 10% off trading fees, so the standard 0.50% rate becomes 0.45% on every trade. The code has to go in at signup, though support can attach one afterwards. The help center describes the discount against the spot rate and does not say whether it applies to perps. The referrer receives 25% of the referred user's trading fees, paid into their cash balance, except the referred user's first Solana buy. Creators can apply to a separate affiliate program whose commission tiers are not published. The Terms ban self-referral and let Fomo claw back rewards. No ChainScouter code is active.

Lighter

The web app at app.lighter.xyz is the main interface. Lighter also publishes its own Lighter Mobile app for iOS and Android, linked from the official site. Unified Trading Accounts can only be enabled on the web for now.

Fomo

Fomo is an iOS app (rated 18+ on the App Store, developer FOMO Labs Inc.), an Android app on Google Play, and, since April 29, 2026, a web app at fomo.family that shares the same account, balance, positions, and follows. You sign in with an Apple ID, a Google account, or an email code. On phones, Face ID or a fingerprint gates opening the app, withdrawals, and key exports. The app is built around a live feed of other users' trades and theses, a leaderboard ranked by realized and unrealized PnL, alerts when traders you follow buy or sell, and TradingView charts. There is no copy trading. Spot trades are instant buys and sells at the quoted price, and the help center documents no limit orders and no API. Perps trade from the same account with one-click orders and stop-loss and take-profit levels.