Variational vs Lighter

Variational

Omni, Variational's trading app, charges no maker or taker fee on any market or trade size. Every trade fills at a price quoted by OLP, Variational's own market maker, so the cost of a trade is the spread in that quote, which the order form shows for your size. Deposits and withdrawals cost a flat 0.1 USDC each, and a liquidation closes the position 0.5% past the quote.

Lighter

A Standard account, the default, pays no maker or taker fee on perpetuals or spot. The trade-off is speed: Standard taker 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. TWAP and RFQ orders cost 0.01% on a Standard account.

Variational

You connect an EVM wallet (Rabby, MetaMask, or anything on WalletConnect), enter an access code while Omni is in private beta, accept the Terms, and sign in with a gasless signature. No identity check is asked for to trade, deposit, or withdraw. KYC applies only to some payouts: referral rewards of $4,000 or more from the on-chain trader campaign, and trading competition prizes. The app checks your location by IP and shows a restricted-region notice to visitors from restricted countries.

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.

Variational

The Restricted Persons policy, last updated April 20, 2026, bars the US and its territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Minor Outlying Islands), Canada, Taiwan, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Sevastopol regions of Ukraine. It also bars US and Canadian persons wherever they live, and the Terms, last updated September 11, 2026, extend the ban to citizens of a restricted country as well as residents. The app applies the list by IP address, and the Terms forbid using a VPN to disguise your location.

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.

Variational

Every crypto perpetual allows up to 50x. Perpetuals on stocks, ETFs, commodities, indexes, and pre-IPO companies cap at 20x, and swaps at 10x, with cocoa at 5x. The markets page shows each market's cap. Maintenance margin is half the initial margin at the leverage you pick, so lowering leverage on an open position can move its liquidation price closer. Positions are cross-margined unless you switch a market to isolated, and swaps are isolated only until they trade around the clock.

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.

Variational

Omni's public API listed 568 markets on October 12, 2026: 434 crypto perpetuals, 120 perpetuals on stocks, ETFs, commodities, indexes, and the pre-IPO names Anthropic and OpenAI, and 14 swaps. Swaps track gold, silver, oil, gasoline, copper, cocoa, US and Asian equity indexes, the VIX, and the dollar index, with financing tied to traditional rates, and they trade market hours and close on weekends. Perps trade around the clock. There is no order book: market orders fill at the quote, limit orders fill in full once the quote crosses your price, and trigger orders fire on the mark price. Take-profit and stop-loss orders fire on the mark or the quoted price, your choice. Limit orders do not fill partially yet, and open orders expire after 120 days.

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.

Variational

Collateral is USDC on Arbitrum One, deposited from the wallet you signed up with. The docs name no other route: funds on another chain have to be bridged to Arbitrum first, or withdrawn there from an exchange. Deposits are gasless, so you need no ETH, and each one costs a flat 0.1 USDC. Your USDC sits in an on-chain settlement pool between you and OLP, kept separate from every other trader's pool.

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 or ETH, 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.

Variational

Withdrawals send USDC on Arbitrum back to the wallet connected to your account, the only destination allowed. They are gasless and cost a flat 0.1 USDC. With positions open, you can withdraw only the balance above your margin requirement.

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.

Variational

Variational has no token yet. It says $VAR launches in Q4 2026 with 32% of supply airdropped to points holders in proportion to their points, all of it unlocked at launch. Points are earned by trading on Omni and go out weekly until the launch. No date, token price, or points-to-token rate has been published. An account needs at least 1 point and must sign the $VAR terms to receive tokens, and the Terms let Variational change or withhold points at its discretion. Variational says it will use all revenue sent to its treasury to buy back and burn $VAR.

Lighter

Lighter airdropped 250M LIT, 25% of supply, on December 30, 2025, to holders of points from its first two seasons. Tokens landed in Lighter accounts with no claim step, and Bubblemaps valued the drop at about $675M on launch day. No third season or second airdrop has been announced. Another 25% of supply is held mainly for future points seasons, and Robinhood says points from Lighter's Robinhood Chain program convert to LIT from an 11M LIT pool.

Variational

During the private beta, an existing trader's referral code is the access code a new account needs. A referral link carries the code in the address, and the app picks it up for the access-code step after you connect a wallet. The referrer earns 5% of the spread their referrals pay, in USDC, and 1 point for every 10 points their referrals earn. Traders unlock a first referral code at $1M in volume and one more slot for each $1M after that, and the app rejects invalid or expired codes. A campaign running since August 12, 2026 also gives points to 10,000 listed on-chain trader addresses that sign up with a code and reach volume milestones.

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.

Variational

Omni runs in the browser at omni.variational.io and is built for mobile browsers too. Variational publishes no native app and says none is needed: on a phone you can add Omni to the home screen as a web app, then link it to a signed-in desktop session with a QR code instead of connecting a wallet on the phone. A read-only API serves market data, and the trading API is not available yet.

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.