Lighter RH leads on 3 of 5 shared benchmarks, Polymarket on 2. Lighter RH wins on Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized (2.88 bps vs 2.98 bps), Perp DEX volume share, live 24h notional ranked ($554.15M vs $107.72M), Funding paid to hold an ETH perp long for 30 days, per venue, live (86.4 bps vs 90.0 bps). Polymarket wins on Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue (89 vs 57), Perp DEX volume to open interest (1.721x vs 2.57x). Data as of 2026-09-23 UTC.
Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h5 shared benchmarks
Lighter's Robinhood deployment: the same zk order-book engine as Lighter mainnet on a separate host (api.rh.lighter.xyz) with its own books, listing US equities next to crypto perps.
The largest crypto prediction market, settled on Polygon via UMA optimistic oracle. CLOB-style order book hosted on the Polymarket gateway with sub-second publish latency for live odds.
Funding is signed. Positive means longs pay shorts, negative means longs get paid to hold. Venues settle on different native periods (hourly on Hyperliquid, dYdX, Lighter, Extended, Pacifica, Ondo, Vest, StandX and ApeX, every 4h on edgeX, every 8h on Kalshi, Aster and the CEX books); every figure is normalized from the venue's own quoted rate and interval before ranking. Funding is only the holding cost. Opening costs (taker fee, spread, impact) are the companion bench perp-fees.
The ratio is a screen, not a verdict. Both terms are the venue's own
figures (24h volume and open interest as each API reports them, in USD),
so a venue that counts both legs of a fill moves its ratio without
changing anything real. A very low ratio (Ostium, 0.2x) means positions
held for days on thin daily volume; a very high one (Kalshi, above 40x)
means a day of trading dwarfs what stays open. The bands in the
methodology say what each range usually means.
Every row is a month of funding at the venue's average daily cost over
the hours measured in the trailing 30 days (average x 30). A venue
ranks only with 576 of the 720 hours (24 days) behind that average;
under the floor the row is provisional, unranked, and shows its day
count (the venues added on 2026-09-22 and 2026-09-23 start there).
Funding is signed: on a month where shorts paid longs the figure is
negative and "cheapest" means "was paid the most".
Frequently asked questions
Lighter RH vs Polymarket: which one is better?
Lighter RH and Polymarket are compared on 5 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Lighter RH leads on Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized. Polymarket leads on Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue. See the live table on this page for every metric.
Which is cheaper, Lighter RH or Polymarket?
On the Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized benchmark, Lighter RH leads at 2.88 bps versus Polymarket at 2.98 bps. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.
Which has the higher active markets, Lighter RH or Polymarket?
On the Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue benchmark, Polymarket leads at 89 versus Lighter RH at 57. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.
How is the Lighter RH vs Polymarket comparison measured?
Every benchmark on this page uses the same open methodology, published at https://openchainbench.com/methodology. Data is CC-BY-4.0. Measurement harnesses are MIT-licensed.
Auto-generated pairs require: both providers in the same benchmark for seven consecutive days, at least 1000 samples per provider, observable third-party search demand, and a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. Editorially curated pairs (like this one) may publish early when search demand is high and data is accruing; panels with fewer than 100 samples are shown as provisional. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo.
