How to track Lighter positions and PnL

Lighter splits an account into a public half and a private one. Open positions, collateral and the PnL chart of any account can be read by anyone from the wallet address that owns it. Your fills, funding payments, order history and transfers cannot: for those, Lighter asks for a read-only token, a key that reads the account and does nothing else. Which half a tracker can reach decides what it can show you.

What Lighter is, in one paragraph

Lighter is a perpetuals exchange with a real order book, built as a rollup on Ethereum and aiming at the same promise as its peers: exchange-grade trading on a venue meant to be verified rather than trusted. Your account is tied to the Ethereum wallet you connected, and one wallet can hold a main account plus sub-accounts, each with its own number, the account index. Standard accounts trade without maker or taker fees; Lighter’s fee tiers cover what the opt-in Premium and Plus accounts pay.

What anyone can read from an address

• Open positions: market, side, size, average entry, position value, unrealized PnL and liquidation price.
• Margin mode and the initial margin fraction, which is leverage in disguise: 5% means 20x.
• Collateral and total account value.
• The PnL chart over time.
• Which accounts the wallet holds: the main one and any sub-accounts.

None of this needs permission, and that cuts both ways: anyone with your address sees the same book. On Lighter, privacy comes from not linking the address to your name, not from hiding the data.

What needs a read-only token

• Your fills, the trade history that realized PnL and tax reports are built on.
• Funding paid and received per position, which over a held week quietly rewrites the PnL.
• Order history, open and past.
• Transfers between accounts.

Lighter keeps these behind authentication, so a tool that only has your address can show where you stand now, but not how you got there.

How to make a read-only token

• Open the read-only tokens page in the Lighter app with the wallet that owns the account connected.
• Name the token and pick an expiry. A token made on the main account can also cover its sub-accounts.
• Copy it straight away: Lighter shows a token once. It starts with ro: and the account index.
• Paste it into the tracker, and revoke it when you stop using that tracker.

The expiry runs from one day to ten years. Pick the shortest you will not resent renewing: a token that lives for a decade will outlive your interest in the tool you gave it to.

The numbers worth watching

• Distance to liquidation on every open position; it is the number that pages you at night.
• Margin mode and free collateral, which decide whether one bad trade stays one bad trade.
• Funding paid and received per position; over a held week it quietly rewrites the PnL.
• Realized PnL from closed fills, the figure tax reporting is typically built on.

The first two you can watch from the address alone. The last two need the token.

The cross-venue problem, again

Almost nobody trades Lighter alone. There is a Hyperliquid main, maybe dYdX or GMX legacy positions, and every venue draws its own dashboard with its own PnL definition. The question that matters at week’s end, total exposure and honest PnL across all of them, needs aggregation with one normalized definition.

Tracking Lighter in TrueHold

TrueHold’s Lighter tracker connects with a read-only token: make one as above and paste it into the Lighter connection. The account then sits in the same book as your Hyperliquid positions, exchange futures, spot wallets and DeFi, with one PnL definition across all of them. The token can only read, so the connection can show your book and nothing more.

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