Lighter Names USDC as Preferred Stablecoin in New Circle Partnership

Circle and Lighter have entered a strategic partnership that designates $USDC as the default and preferred stablecoin across the decentralized perpetuals exchange's full product stack.

The integration covers spot and perpetual trading, settlement, liquidations, and onboarding flows, Circle said in a Tuesday post on X.

"As onchain markets scale, trusted dollar infrastructure becomes core market infrastructure," the stablecoin issuer wrote, framing the deal as part of a broader push to embed its digital dollars deeper into onchain trading venues.

Lighter responded that $USDC has been a foundational asset for the protocol and its traders since day one, adding that the two firms plan to continue building together.

The deal lands as Lighter works to recover momentum lost since its December token generation event. The exchange briefly led the perp DEX market by volume in November and December, but has since slipped behind Hyperliquid, Aster, and EdgeX.

Lighter currently ranks fourth by 7-day perp volume at roughly $8.7 billion, per DefiLlama. Meanwhile, the LIT token has struggled despite a string of feature rollouts, including unified collateral accounts and multi-asset margin.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.