Lighter leads on 5 of 6 shared benchmarks, Pacifica on 1. Lighter wins on Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized (1.89 bps vs 4.22 bps), Perp DEX volume share, live 24h notional ranked ($1.46B vs $731.70M), Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue (211 vs 78), Perp DEX volume to open interest (2.41x vs 5.23x). Pacifica wins on Perp DEX capital efficiency (3 vs 0.275). Data as of 2026-10-06 UTC.
Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h7 shared benchmarks, 6 measured on both sides
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.
TVL from DefiLlama /protocol/{slug} currentChainTvls, excluding staking and pool2 categories. Market count from each venue's native API (same source as the perp-active-markets bench). The ratio reflects architectural choices, not absolute liquidity: a high ratio means the venue can list many markets cheaply, not that each market has deep liquidity. Compare with perp-volume-share for the liquidity angle.
P/F = circulating market cap (CoinGecko) / annualized fees (DeFiLlama dailyFees, trailing 30d x 365/30), on the DeFiLlama parent the token accrues from. Fees include the share paid to liquidity providers; P/S uses protocol revenue only. Low-float tokens show a much higher FDV/F than P/F. Pre-TGE venues are listed unranked with fees and OI, no ratio. A low multiple is not a recommendation.
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 vs Pacifica: which one is better?
Lighter and Pacifica are compared on 7 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Lighter leads on Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized. Pacifica leads on Perp DEX capital efficiency. See the live table on this page for every metric.
Which is cheaper, Lighter or Pacifica?
On the Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized benchmark, Lighter leads at 1.89 bps versus Pacifica at 4.22 bps. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.
Which has the higher markets per $m tvl, Lighter or Pacifica?
On the Perp DEX capital efficiency benchmark, Pacifica leads at 3 versus Lighter at 0.275. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.
How is the Lighter vs Pacifica 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.
