Variational against the field

Volume, markets and open interest beside two order-book venues, measured live from each one's own public API, plus what a point would be worth if Variational were valued like the two of them that already have a token. The comparison everybody posts is the first table. The reason it is usually wrong is the second one: open interest is not quoted on the same basis everywhere, and one of these venues publishes a figure that counts every position twice.

Pulled 1 hour ago, live from each venue.

Perp DEX data card

Measured 1 hour ago, from each venue's own public API

Measure	Variational	Lighter	Hyperliquid
Volume, 24hNotional traded. Verified against the sum of every market on the venue.	$932.11M	$1.48B	$11.77B$3.77B its own perpetual DEX$8.00B builder-deployed DEXs
MarketsLive perpetual markets. Spot books and delisted markets excluded.	519	202	471
Real-world volume, 24hEquities, ETFs, indices, metals, energy and FX. Classified by us, not by the venue.	$322.45M	$241.24M	$7.98B
Real-world markets	79	85	152
Open interestBoth sides of every position, maker and taker. Lighter and Hyperliquid publish the single count, so theirs are doubled to match.	$1.29B	$879.36M	$21.90B
Volume, all timeSince the venue opened. There is no 30 day row because none of the three publishes one.	$281.65B	not published	$5190.10B
Market model	RFQ	order book	order book
Token	none yet	LIT, $2.24B FDV	HYPE, $54.79B FDV
What can take your position	One pool is the counterparty to every trade, plus auto-deleveraging	A single sequencer orders the book, plus auto-deleveraging	Validator set plus vault backstop, and each hosted DEX sets its own terms

Bold is the largest figure in its row and is not a verdict. Blue is Variational, because this is a Variational site. An order book you can read and a quote you request are different products, and no row settles that.

The last row is the only editorial line on the card: it names a mechanism, not a rating, and every venue here has one.

Open interest comes in two conventions

Long side of every book$387.41M

Short side of every book$256.15M

Each position counted once$643.56M

Both sides, maker and taker$1.29B

What Variational publishes$1.29B2.00×

The published figure is the gross one. It counts both sides of every position, maker and taker, which is a normal way to quote open interest and lands at exactly 2.00 times the single count. The two sides above are unequal ($387.41M long against $256.15M short), so each is one side of a trade rather than a whole market: add them for one count per position, double that for both.

Against Hyperliquid, on the same basis either way, Variational is 5.9% of its open interest. Take the gross figure and set it beside Hyperliquid's single count, which is what a quick comparison does, and it reads as 11.8%. Nothing about the venues changed between those two numbers.

Which convention you pick does not matter. Mixing them does. The card puts all three venues on the wide basis, the one Variational publishes, so Lighter and Hyperliquid are doubled to match and every ratio is unchanged by that. For the record, Hyperliquid's own published daily volume reconciles to the sum of its single-sided per-market figures to within 0.1%, so it quotes the narrow basis and Variational the wide one.

The real-world share

Variational$322.45M34.6% of its volume

79 of 519 markets

Lighter$241.24M16.3% of its volume

85 of 202 markets

Hyperliquid$7.98B67.8% of its volume

152 of 471 markets

Variational does not lead this, and the threads saying it does are counting one venue out of ten. Hyperliquid trades $7.98Bof real-world notional today against Variational's $322.45M, at 68% of its own book against 35%. Almost all of it is on the $8.00B that trades on the perpetual DEXs built on top of it, which the endpoint everybody queries does not return.

What is true instead. Variational carries 79 real-world markets and 519 in total in one venue, on one margin account, with equities, ETFs, metals, energy and currencies in the same book as the crypto. The comparison above is spread across ten separate market places with separate books. That is a difference in shape, and it is the one a reader can actually use. It is not a claim about size.

An unknown ticker counts as crypto, and that flatters us. A ticker means different things in different places: one venue's SPX is the S&P 500, another's is a memecoin of the same name, and tokens backed by gold are tokens rather than gold markets. So anything unrecognised stays on the crypto side. Variational's own side is read from its own product names and is near exact, while the others can only be undercounted, so every gap above is a floor on the real one. Run pnpm audit:venues to see what was left out.

What a point would be worth at their valuation

Variational has no token. These are the two venues here that do, priced by the market right now, with their valuation carried across to Variational two ways.

Basis	Their FDV	Variational implied	Per point	Per 1,000 points
LIT, same FDVLighter floats 25% of its supply, so its FDV is 4.0x its market cap	$2.24B	$2.24B$615.41M airdrop	$66.17	$66.2K
LIT, same FDV per $1 of daily volumeLighter trades at 1.5x its own daily volume	$2.24B	$1.41B$388.31M airdrop	$41.75	$41.8K
HYPE, same FDVHyperliquid floats 23% of its supply, so its FDV is 4.3x its market cap	$54.79B	$54.79B$15.07B airdrop	$1,620.01	$1.62M
HYPE, same FDV per $1 of daily volumeHyperliquid trades at 4.7x its own daily volume	$54.79B	$4.34B$1.19B airdrop	$128.32	$128.3K

None of this is a forecast. Variational has announced no token, no supply and no date. Every row assumes the airdrop simulator's own community defaults: 27.5% of supply in the first round and 9.3M points in existence at the time. Move either assumption and every figure moves with it, which you can do on the airdrop screen.

The two bases disagree by roughly the ratio of the venues' volumes, and that disagreement is the useful part. Read the wide one as the ceiling somebody quotes in a thread and the narrow one as the version that survives being asked why a smaller venue would be worth the same.

How to tell the ceiling from a forecast. On the widest row the first-round airdrop alone comes to $15.07B, which is 6.7x the entire LITtoken at today's price. A giveaway worth several times a live competitor is the shape of an upper bound, not of an expectation.

What is actually trading

The eight biggest markets on each venue by 24h volume, tagged the way this page counted them. This is where to check the classification.

Variationallisted markets

BTCBitcoin	crypto	$312.75M34%
ETHEthereum	crypto	$206.49M22%
XAUGold	RWA	$94.84M10%
MUMicron Technology, Inc.	RWA	$31.50M3%
SOLSolana	crypto	$30.33M3%
CLWTI Crude Oil	RWA	$28.28M3%
SOXLDirexion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X ETF	RWA	$26.58M3%
HYPEHyperliquid	crypto	$24.69M3%

Lighteractive perpetual books, spot excluded

BTC	crypto	$691.38M47%
ETH	crypto	$392.56M27%
HYPE	crypto	$51.85M4%
SOL	crypto	$51.18M3%
SKHYNIXUSD	RWA	$48.92M3%
XAU	RWA	$44.51M3%
WTI	RWA	$38.29M3%
SNDK	RWA	$33.64M2%

Hyperliquidevery perpetual DEX it hosts, spot excluded

xyz:SKHX	RWA	$1.98B17%
BTC	crypto	$1.77B15%
ETH	crypto	$1.08B9%
xyz:SNDK	RWA	$1.01B9%
xyz:MU	RWA	$789.30M7%
xyz:DRAM	RWA	$555.30M5%
xyz:XYZ100	RWA	$526.19M4%
xyz:SKHY	RWA	$480.20M4%

Why a farmer should care. Points are a share of a weekly pool, so the venue's own volume is the denominator you are splitting it with, and growth in the real-world column is the part of it that is hardest for anyone else to copy. The valuation above is a different kind of number: it is the market's opinion of somebody else, borrowed. To put your own balance against it, and to move the assumptions it rests on, there is the airdrop simulator, and for how far the pool itself moves week to week, the Points Lab.

One block, for posting

Screenshot it. The volume row is the one Variational is behind on and it stays, because a card that only showed the flattering half would be checked in ten seconds.

Variational at LIT's valuationLighter is worth $2.24B fully diluted. Variational has no token.

One point would be worth

$66.17

$66.2K per 1,000 points, at 27.5% of supply and 9.3M points at the drop

Volume, 24h

$932.11M

$1.48B on Lighter 63% of it

Open interest

$1.29B

$879.36M on Lighter 1.5x more

Markets

519

202 on Lighter 2.6x more

Not a forecast: nothing has been announced. Open interest counts both sides. Measured 29 Jul 2026.variational.0xtimberj.com

Where these come from

Variational: metadata/stats, which carries both open-interest sides and every listing's 24h volume. Lighter: orderBookDetails, filtered to live perpetual books, so the eight spot books and eighteen delisted markets are out. Hyperliquid: metaAndAssetCtxs. Token prices and fully diluted valuations: CoinGecko's public markets endpoint. All four are public and unauthenticated, all four are read by our server rather than your browser, and the whole snapshot is one request away at /api/venues if you want to check any figure on this page.

No 30-day column, deliberately: none of the three publishes one, and the aggregator everybody quotes for it now sits behind a paid plan. A number we cannot recompute is a number we will not print.