Lighter CEO points to fixed income as DeFi’s next big opportunity at Korea Blockchain Week 2026

Lighter CEO Vlad Novakovski used his time at Korea Blockchain Week 2026 to make a case that sounds almost old-fashioned for a crypto stage. He said DeFi has a big opportunity in fixed income markets. The pitch carries more weight because Lighter has already started building toward it. In August 2026, the exchange launched a US10Y perpetual contract, a product referencing the benchmark 10-year US Treasury, with leverage of up to 20x. What Lighter is actually building Lighter is a decentralized exchange for perpetual futures, often called perps. A perp is a derivative that lets traders bet on an asset’s price without an expiry date. The exchange runs on a custom zero-knowledge rollup, or ZK-rollup, built on Ethereum. A rollup processes trades off the main Ethereum chain, then posts compressed proof back to it. Lighter uses a central limit order book, or CLOB, model. That is the same basic structure traditional exchanges use: buyers and sellers post orders, and the book matches them by price. The platform lists more than 190 markets. Those span crypto, equities, and commodities alongside the newer fixed income products. Leverage limits vary by asset class. Crypto pairs can go up to 50...