Decentralized perpetuals protocol Lighter said its average block proving time has fallen from about 5.3 minutes to roughly 1 minute over the past month, driven by two separate optimizations released on July 23 and Aug. 23.
Lighter said the faster proving flow allows it to verify blocks more quickly, which raises processing capacity, cuts infrastructure costs, and creates more room for additional scaling.
How the two main optimizations worked
The first change was a Heavy/Light decomposition. Lighter split its transaction circuit into a lightweight circuit and a heavyweight circuit, allowing simple quote updates — which account for the large majority of transactions — to pay only lightweight constraints. The protocol said that reduced proving time by half.
The second improvement came from Prover backend optimizations tied to a proving competition held with Eigen Labs. Under the same circuit conditions, Lighter said those changes cut proving time by more than half again.
The first batch of these optimizations went live on Aug. 23, and additional batches are still being rolled out.
Extra gains from the Aug. 10 change
Lighter also said that on Aug. 10 it batched all Schnorr signature verifications into a single Plonky3 proof for each block, producing an improvement of about 20%.
According to the protocol, the optimizations are orthogonal to one another and their effects can stack. The remaining competition-related optimizations are expected to deliver another roughly 2x gain. Compared with mid-July, the total improvement could reach about 10x.
Capacity and withdrawal finality
Lighter said its sustained processing capacity is now above its historical peak load and that the system has remained stable during traffic spikes.
It also said the lower bound for withdrawal finality has been reduced from about 21–22 minutes to around 16–17 minutes.