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Getting started
Using Vex
Lighter trading
Perps and spot on Lighter Core and Robinhood Chain, and what each approval covers.
Lighter is an order-book exchange, not an AMM, and it is the first venue Vex integrates where the thing you hold is a position rather than a token in your wallet. The lighter namespace is 40 tools, the largest single namespace Vex ships: public market data, authenticated account and order reads, and the approval-gated write paths for deposits, orders, protective orders, withdrawals and the two setup steps that make managed trading possible at all.
The shape of it is the same as everything else in Vex. Your keys stay on your machine, the agent proposes and never signs, and every action that moves value or changes exchange state stops at a card you read and accept. What is different is that an exchange keeps state of its own: an account, collateral, open orders, open positions and a trading credential. This page is about that state and who is allowed to change it.
Two environments, chosen explicitly
Lighter runs as two separate deployments, and Vex treats them as two separate worlds. Accounts, collateral, markets, trading keys and fee authorizations do not cross between them. The environment is explicit once you select it, and the two always-loaded readiness shortcuts are each locked to one of them so neither can drift to the other.
| Environment | Settlement asset | Where a deposit comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Lighter Core | USDC | Ethereum mainnet. ETH in the same wallet pays the network fee. |
| Lighter on Robinhood Chain | USDG | Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663), the same Arbitrum Orbit L2 the launchpads and the $VEX token live on. ETH pays gas there too. |
Only the settlement asset counts as depositable collateral. Other tokens in the wallet are not silently converted: turning them into USDC or USDG is a separate swap or bridge, live quoted and separately approved, and the readiness read says so rather than quietly assuming it.
What the agent can do
| Lane | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Read | Environment status, the market list and one market in detail, order books, the recent trade tape and OHLCV candles. On the account side: public account state, and authenticated positions, open orders, order history and fills. Plus the durable status of anything you already started, a deposit, a withdrawal, a key registration or an order. |
| Preview | An exact order preview built from live market and account data, which is what an approval card is later rebuilt against. Managed onboarding also computes the exact settlement-asset top-up a named trade would need before any deposit is prepared. Previews are read-only and place nothing. |
| Act | Deposit, register a trading key, authorize fees, create, modify, cancel and cancel-all orders, attach native OCO protection to an existing perpetual position, close a position reduce-only, withdraw, and claim a settled withdrawal. Each of these executes only from the matching card you accepted. |
Order types follow the exchange rather than a simplified subset. A limit order carries the time in force you chose, good-till-time, immediate-or-cancel or post-only, and Vex preserves that choice exactly. A market order requires a worst acceptable execution price; there is no unbounded market order. Protective variants are reduce-only perpetual orders and each requires an explicit trigger, and Vex checks the reducing side, the live position size, the trigger direction and the price direction before the preview and again after approval. A trigger already crossed at revalidation is refused rather than fired late.
The three setup steps
You never paste a trading key into Vex, and Vex never asks for one. The account, the credential and the fee permission are built in three approvals, in this order, and the readiness shortcut tells you which one you are missing.
| Step | What happens | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Deposit | Your wallet sends the settlement asset to the Lighter gateway, with the exact settlement-token allowance if one is needed. If it is the wallet’s first deposit, this is what creates a Lighter account owned by that wallet. Credit is treated as final only after the on-chain receipt, the Deposit event, the matching Lighter transaction status and the wallet-owned account balance all agree. | It places no trade and contains no swap, bridge, transfer, withdrawal or key registration. Network fees are selected at execution rather than fixed on the card. |
| 2. Register a trading key | Vex generates an API key locally, encrypts it into your vault, and registers its publichalf on a free slot of your Lighter account. Your Vex wallet signs Lighter’s human-readable ownership message locally, off-chain, which costs no gas. The credential only becomes usable for signing after the live slot matches the key derived from your vault, the official client check passes, and the next nonce is exactly the approved one plus one. | It authorizes registering that exact public key at that exact account, key index and nonce, and nothing else: no deposit, order, transfer or withdrawal. |
| 3. Authorize fees | You approve Vex as an integrator on your Lighter account, at the rates below, and accept the account-tier change the exchange requires for that. The card names the collector account and its wallet address, the maker and taker rate for perps and for spot separately, the exchange’s own fees beside them, and the expiry. | It authorizes no trade. Every order still raises its own approval. Revoking stops future fee-bearing orders and leaves orders already submitted on their signed terms. |
What needs an approval
Everything that moves value or changes exchange state, and nothing else. Reads and previews are free and silent. The full mechanics of the approval broker, including what happens when you change a scope while a card is waiting, are on Approvals & the Safety Contract; the two Lighter cards are broken down field by field on Studio approvals & scope.
| Action | Approval |
|---|---|
| Deposit into your Lighter account | One card per deposit, bound to the exact wallet, environment, asset, amount and gateway. |
| Register a trading key | One card, bound to the exact public key, account, key index and nonce. |
| Authorize or revoke Vex trading fees | One card, including the account-tier change and its exchange costs. |
| Create, modify, cancel or cancel-all orders | One card per action, rebuilt from a fresh preview and re-checked against live market and account state immediately before signing. |
| Attach OCO protection to a position | One card covering both legs: they are submitted as one grouped transaction, and protection is reported active only once both children are visible in provider evidence. |
| Close a position | One card. The close is reduce-only and sized to the live position. |
| Withdraw, and later claim | Two cards. The first submits the exchange-side withdrawal on the secure route, which carries a delay the card states along with the earliest claimable time. The later claim on the settlement network is a separate wallet approval with its own network fee. |
Signing itself happens only in Vex’s privileged local process. The renderer, the chat transcript, logs, telemetry and provider error text never receive a private key, a signature, a signed payload or an auth token, and Vex refuses raw private-key-shaped strings from tool parameters, environment variables and command-line arguments as a credential source. See Keys & encryption.
Fees, and the account tier Lighter requires
Lighter does not use the 25 bps input-token Vex Feethat swaps, bridges and launches pay. An exchange charges its integrator at the venue, so Vex’s fee here is an integrator fee credited on Lighter itself, at rates you authorize once and can revoke at any time:
| Market | Vex fee | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Perpetuals | 10 bps (0.10%) maker and taker | Executed trade value. |
| Spot | 25 bps (0.25%) maker and taker | Executed trade value. On spot the fee is deducted from the asset you receive. |
The authorization runs for ten yearsand is revocable from Vex whenever you want; the card shows the exact expiry date rather than a phrase. Lighter’s own trading fees are separate from this and are shown next to it on the same card, so the two are never presented as one number.
Authorizing fees also requires an account-tier change: to Plus on Lighter Core, or Premium on Robinhood Chain, which has no Plus tier. This is Lighter’s requirement and not Vex’s: from 2026-09-14the exchange rejects integrator-attributed trades, and new integrator approvals, from Standard accounts. The tier is tied to your L1 address and applies to that Lighter account and its subaccounts, it carries the exchange’s own cost, which the card states, and Vex does not switch it back for you. You can change the account type yourself in the Lighter app; upgrades apply immediately, and Lighter allows another tier change once twenty-four hours have passed since the last one.
What is not supported
Named plainly, because a missing feature that looks like a bug costs you more than an honest gap:
- TWAP orders. Not available.
- OTO and OTOCO orders. Not available.
- Entry with attached protection. You cannot open a position and attach a stop or a target in the same order. Protection is attached to a position that already exists, as its own approval.
Native OCO is supported, for one existing perpetual position at a time: exactly one reduce-only stop-loss and one same-size reduce-only take-profit, bound to one approval and one grouped submission. Vex does not emulate the sibling cancellation in software, and it never retries a grouped submission whose outcome is uncertain.
Order writes are also never automatically retried. An outcome Vex cannot prove stays pending and is reconciled from the exchange’s own evidence, because resubmitting an order you might already have is how one trade becomes two.
This is a real exchange and real money. A perpetual position can be liquidated, a leveraged loss can exceed what a spot position would have lost, and an order that fills is filled. Vex reads the market and prepares the order; it does not predict the market, and nothing on this page is a claim that trading through it will be profitable. Approve the numbers on the card, not the summary in the chat.