DEX

In December 2025, centralized exchanges experienced a sharp slowdown across spot and derivatives, with spot volumes falling 32% versus November. Reported trading activity ranged between $990M and $1.13B, according to different accounts. DEX volumes improved late in the year and remained higher than January levels, though still below October's peak.

Lighter, a privacy-focused perpetual DEX on Ethereum, saw about $250 million withdrawn from the platform a day after its LIT token generation event, with net outflows near $101 million. Perpetual trading volumes on Lighter dropped from $66 billion to $31 billion between late November and late December, while LIT's price slid 32% from $3.30 to $2.20 before rebounding to $2.60 amid mixed analyst views and slightly bearish derivatives positioning.

According to the 0xResearch newsletter, Canton processed $6 trillion in RWAs in Q4 2025 and handled about $350 billion per day in US Treasury activity, after its token became transferable on Nov. 10. On Dec. 30, Lighter airdropped and launched LIT, whose float and fee multiples are already comparable to Hyperliquid.

In November, Lighter allocated over $24M in LIT to Jump Crypto for market‑making. According to wallet allocations, Jump Crypto received 323,956 LIT in fees and 9,284,890 LIT as liquidity, equal to 0.93% of total supply and 3.72% of circulating supply. DeFiLlama data shows daily fees fell from $1.39M to $139K in December.

Following a Dec. 27 exploit on the Flow blockchain, loan settlements on NFT lending platform Flowty were halted after the Cadence execution environment was paused until the morning of Dec. 29. Flowty reported 11 loans maturing during the outage, with multiple defaults and two unsettled positions, and has since stopped all settlements while keeping affected loans outstanding. The FLOW token price fell sharply after the incident and continued to decline to $0.086 as ecosystem functionality, including token swaps, remains impaired.

Yield Basis introduces an IL-free AMM that removes impermanent loss via leverage and offers BTC-denominated returns to liquidity providers. LPs can either hold ybBTC to receive trading fees in BTC or stake ybBTC to earn YB emissions, with the fee switch activated earlier this month. Roughly $450,000 was distributed in the week ending Dec. 25.

Lighter's LIT fell roughly 22.2% to around $2.62 after briefly reaching $4.04 as its airdrop distribution went live on Tuesday. Trading activity jumped, with 24-hour volume at 13.43 million, while analysis of 10,000 wallets indicated selling outweighed accumulation early in the distribution. Derivatives net flow readings also showed sustained downside pressure.

Bitwise Asset Management said on 30 December 2025 it filed with the SEC for 11 crypto strategy ETFs covering tokens such as AAVE, UNI, ZEC, TAO, CC, ENA, HYPE, NEAR, STRK, SUI, and TRX. According to its filings, each fund may invest up to 60% directly in the applicable token and 40% via ETPs, with derivatives counted at notional value to meet an 80% minimum. Pending approval, the launch is targeted around 16 March 2026.

On Tuesday, Bubblemaps reported that Lighter distributed $675 million in LIT via an airdrop, which CoinGecko ranks as the 10th largest by USD value. As of Wednesday, around 75% of recipients still held and 7% had added more, while Nansen showed a $678 million market cap and a price above $2.71 at 11:20 am UTC.

Users of Perpetual trading platform Lighter report failed withdrawals showing the error "Too many L2 Withdrawals." On-chain explorer data points to a lag between the Prover and Sequencer, with the last committed block #137759880 finalized prior to the December 30, 2025 update. The team has not issued a formal statement, while LIT trades at $2.84.