Lighter's Average Block Proving Time Drops from 5.3 Minutes to About 1 Minute

Decentralized perpetual contract protocol Lighter announced that its average block proving time has dropped from about 5.3 minutes to about 1 minute over the past month, achieved through two independent optimizations launched on July 23 and August 23. Lighter can now complete block verification faster, thereby increasing processing capacity, reducing infrastructure costs, and creating room for further expansion. The first optimization is the Heavy/Light decomposition. This approach splits the transaction circuit into lightweight and heavy circuits, allowing simple quote updates, which constitute the vast majority of transactions, to only incur lightweight constraints, halving proving time as a result. The second is a Prover backend optimization from a proving competition held in collaboration with Eigen Labs, which more than halved proving time again under identical circuit conditions. The first batch of optimizations went live on August 23, with more batches still in progress. Additionally, on August 10, all Schnorr signature verifications were batched into a single Plonky3 proof per block, delivering an improvement of about 20%. These optimizations are orthogonal and cumulative in effect, with the remaining competition optimizations expected to deliver roughly another 2x improvement, totaling an expected ~10x gain compared to mid-July. Lighter's sustained processing capacity now exceeds historical peak loads, with the lower bound for withdrawal finality reduced from about 21–22 minutes to about 16–17 minutes, remaining stable during traffic spikes.