Lighter Founder: All Economic Value of Lighter Will Flow to the Token, Equity Structure Converted to Token Structure at TGE

Odaily News, Lighter founder Vladimir Novakovski published an article on X this morning titled "Equity and Tokens."

In the article, Novakovski clarified that all economic value generated by Lighter will belong to token holders.

Lighter's original intention has always been to use venture capital to guide the project until the moment of token issuance. Lighter is a US company and exists as a single entity—the entity that issued equity in the years before TGE is the same entity that issued tokens at TGE. Apart from converting to a token cap table at TGE, the equity cap table will serve no further function in the future.

More specifically, Lighter completed its final equity financing round a few months before TGE, which was oversubscribed by approximately 5x, attracting over $300 million in capital interest against a $68 million allocation. At that time, all equity stakeholders (including early investors and former employees) were informed of the future plan—that their equity value would only be reflected as shares on the token cap table—and were given the opportunity to sell their equity stakes. Anyone who disagreed with the concept of "all value flows to the token" could easily exit at a higher valuation. Ultimately, less than 1% of equity holders chose to sell their shares, while everyone else supported Lighter's commitment to "value accruing to the token" by choosing to stay.