Lightning is often described as a payments network, but its second-order effects are even more interesting: it is also a capital network. LN Markets was one of the first teams to recognise that and build for it. Founded in 2019 in Paris by Romain Rouphael and team, the company offers Bitcoin derivatives — futures and options — that are funded, settled, and withdrawn entirely over the Lightning Network.

The result is a fundamentally different trading experience. Users do not deposit through opaque banking rails or sit in custodial wallets for days. They open a Lightning channel, fund a position in seconds, take a trade, and pull profits back to their own wallet just as quickly. Capital sits with the user except when actively margining a position, which dramatically shrinks counterparty exposure compared with traditional venues.

This is the Fulgur thesis in production. We back teams that use Lightning not as a marketing layer but as a structural advantage — and LN Markets is a textbook example. Bitcoin-denominated derivatives, settled on Bitcoin's own scaling layer, served to traders globally without the operational drag of a SWIFT-era exchange. The architecture is simply better.

The market it addresses is enormous. Crypto derivatives volume regularly dwarfs spot, and yet the venues that dominate it have repeatedly failed users through custody mismanagement, withdrawal halts, and rehypothecation. A Lightning-native derivatives venue offers a credible path toward derivatives trading that is fast, cheap, and trust-minimised.

We have been partnered with LN Markets since 2020. The team continues to push the frontier of what is possible when financial markets are built directly on Bitcoin rails — and we are proud to back them as they expand that frontier.