Lighter says block verification is about 5x faster, with withdrawal delay floor cut to 16-17 minutes

Decentralized exchange Lighter said it has made fresh progress on its validation system, bringing its average block verification time down from about 5.3 minutes to roughly 1 minute over the past month. The company attributed the change to two separate upgrades. The first, which it called a "heavy/light decomposition," splits validation circuits by trade complexity so that simple trades, which account for more than 98% of volume, incur a lower verification cost. Lighter said that change alone halved verification time. The second came from a prover optimization competition run jointly with Eigen Labs. That effort focused on infrastructure-level improvements to the Plonky2 prover, and the first batch of results went live on Aug. 23, cutting verification time by more than half again. Lighter also said its main validation setup relies on a cluster of Apple Silicon Mac mini machines, backed by an elastic cloud overflow layer. As throughput improved, the cloud overflow layer dropped from running for several hours a day to nearly zero usage, while the baseline time tied to withdrawal finality fell from about 21-22 minutes to around 16-17 minutes.