Lighter (LIT) token unlock: 500M LIT vesting from an estimated 27 December 2026, and trackers disagree on the date

The Lighter LIT token unlock has no official date: the 27 December 2026 shown here is an estimate from the tracker Tokenomist, not a day set by the project. About 500 million LIT, or 50% of the supply, held by the team and investors of the perpetuals exchange come out of a one-year lock and then vest over three years, so they will not all arrive on one day. A second tracker, Tokenomics.com, puts the first release on 28 January 2027.

This page uses the earlier date because it is the first one any source gives. Read it as a placeholder until Lighter names a day. The tokens move on-chain, so there is no venue and no ticket.

Lighter LIT token unlock: what the project actually published

The schedule comes from the thread Lighter posted on X on 30 December 2025, the day LIT started trading. “The team and investors all have a 1-year unlock and 3-year linear vesting after,” it reads, in the archived copy on Thread Reader, and Cointelegraph quoted the same words. The thread gives no calendar date and does not say when the clock starts. The team holds 26% of supply (260M LIT) and investors 24% (240M). The Block reported that Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital led the $68 million round Lighter raised in November 2025, at a $1.5 billion valuation.

The other half of the tokenomics is the ecosystem share. An airdrop to users of the first two points seasons took 25% of supply and was distributed at launch; the remaining 25% is set aside for incentives and partnerships. Cointelegraph reported that critics went after the 50% insider share, while supporters pointed to the long vesting. Tokenomics.com counts 250M LIT unlocked today. Tokenomist’s July research puts real circulation at about 234M after the first burn, so the insider tokens outnumber the float by about two to one.

A token unlock makes tokens transferable. It does not mean that they are sold, and nothing published says what these holders intend to do.

Trackers give different dates, and Lighter gives none

Lighter’s documentation index had no tokenomics page on 1 November 2026, and its LIT utility page says nothing about vesting. The dates in circulation are therefore the trackers’ own readings of one line in a thread.

Tokenomist does not explain its date. One year after the launch is 30 December 2026, so 27 December falls three days short of it. Neither tracker says whether a December date would be a first payment or only the start of vesting.

Tokenomics.com gives the fullest calendar: 13,515,000 LIT (1.4% of supply) on 28 January 2027, 27.0M LIT (2.7%) on 28 February, then 13.5M on the 28th of April, May, June and July. It counts 36 events including the launch, 35 of them still to come, ending on 28 January 2030, and gives each listed tranche to the team and investors in a 52% to 48% split, the same ratio as their 26% and 24% allocations.

The 27.0M row does not break the monthly pace. March has no row, so the seven months from January to July 2027 add up to about 94.5M LIT, or seven times 13.5M. February therefore looks like two months paid together, although the site does not say so. The total points the same way: the 500,055,000 LIT it still shows as locked divide into exactly 37 parts of 13,515,000, one for each monthly date from January 2027 to January 2030. Only those seven months are visible, so that remains our reading of a partial table.

On that reading the first twelve months would release about 162M LIT, close to Tokenomist’s 166.2M a year. A plain division of 500M by 36 months gives 13.9M a month, or 166.7M a year. So the two trackers differ by a month on the start and only slightly on the pace. LIT traded at $3.144 at 09:12 UTC on 1 November 2026, according to DefiLlama prices, which would value a 13.5M tranche at about $42 million at that moment. Tokenomics.com shows $37.2M for the same tranche, at a price it does not date, and 5.4% of market cap.

LIT burns run well below the scheduled release

LIT supply has been shrinking through buybacks, which Lighter’s documentation describes as daily purchases funded by trading fees. Tokenomist counted 16,000,294.58 LIT repurchased between 5 January and 17 July 2026, for about $23.0 million in USDC, with monthly spending down from $6.71 million in January toward $2 million to $3 million by mid-2026. Since 30 June 2026, repurchased LIT is burned for good. The first burn removed 15,638,703 LIT on 10 July.

The next one was far smaller. Lighter burned 2,452,017 LIT on 11 October 2026, matching everything repurchased by the end of the third quarter, according to PlayToEarn. That burn equals less than a fifth of one 13.5M LIT monthly release.

Tokenomist’s own estimate, based on a trailing six-month rate, is about 30.6M LIT removed a year against 166.2M vesting, which would turn a shrinking supply into a net rise of about 135.6M LIT a year. That is arithmetic on past buybacks. Tokenomist calls the rate directional, and it would move with volume and with any change of policy.

How Hyperliquid’s team release compares

Hyperliquid set aside about 23.8% of supply (about 237M HYPE) for core contributors, against 50% for insiders at Lighter, and Tokenomist describes it as a no-VC design. The Block reported a first team release of about 1.75M HYPE on 29 November 2025 and 1.2M HYPE on 6 January 2026.

Hyperliquid’s full timetable is not public, and a team member told The Block that “The vesting is not linear”. Lighter’s rule is public and linear, yet its first date is still unsettled. Our page on the Bitway unlock of 2 November shows a similar case of trackers reading one schedule differently.

What Lighter’s business looks like before the release

DefiLlama showed $6.06 million of fees and $5.05 million of revenue for Lighter over the 30 days to 31 October 2026, read on 1 November at 09:16 UTC; the last daily figure, $86,458, may be incomplete. All-time fees stood at $87.6 million in the same reading. Open interest was $707.4 million across Lighter Perps and Lighter Robinhood Perps in DefiLlama’s bucket of 1 November at 00:00 UTC, against $7.45 billion for Hyperliquid Perps. The free DefiLlama endpoints did not return a current perpetuals volume, so none is given here.

Lighter wrote at launch that the value of its products “will fully accrue to LIT holders”, and that revenue “will be allocated between growth and buybacks depending on market conditions”. For how these venues work, see our guide to on-chain perpetuals and derivatives.

What is still unknown, and what readers can check

Lighter has not published the day of the first release or the rhythm of payments, weekly or monthly. We could not read its X account for this page, so a dated post there would overrule every tracker date above.

The unlock is on-chain and no regional rule is attached to it. A separate matter: Tokenomist says the Lighter perpetuals offered inside Robinhood Wallet since 1 July 2026 are closed to residents of the US, the UK, Canada, Switzerland, the UAE and Singapore.

Three dates are worth marking: 27 December 2026, 30 December 2026 and 28 January 2027. If the first two pass with no LIT leaving insider allocations, the Tokenomics.com calendar gains weight. PlayToEarn expects the burn after the fourth quarter to be the first test of buybacks against vesting.