Lighter Sign Message Popup Not Showing? Fix the Signature Prompt

You click Connect Wallet on Lighter, pick your wallet, and then nothing happens. No signature prompt, no error, just a button that looks like it is still thinking. The connection has stalled, and it is almost never a problem with Lighter or with your funds.

The reason it feels alarming is that the failure is silent. The site has handed a request to your wallet and is waiting for an answer. Your wallet has taken the request. What has not happened is the part you can see: the wallet putting a window in front of you. Below are the causes in the order they actually come up, what to check for each, and how to tell the difference between a wallet problem and a page problem.

What is Lighter actually asking for?

Lighter

Lighter has no email and no password. Your wallet is your login, and the way you prove you control an address is to sign a plain message. That signature is free, produces no on-chain transaction, and moves nothing. Our connect a wallet and deposit walkthrough covers the normal flow at app.lighter.xyz: choose your wallet, approve the signature request, and the app recognizes the address.

That matters here for one reason. Because it is a message and not a transaction, a failure to sign has no cost and no on-chain trace. There is nothing to reverse and nothing stuck. You are simply not logged in yet.

Why does the sign message popup not appear?

These are the usual culprits, roughly in order of how often they come up.

1. The wallet window opened behind the browser

Wallet extensions raise their prompt in a separate browser window rather than inside the page. That window can land behind the browser you are looking at, on a second monitor, or on another desktop, and on some setups it does not get raised to the front at all. MetaMask has an open report titled exactly that, extension window doesn't popup on request.

Check it: click the wallet extension icon in your browser toolbar. If the request arrived, it is there. MetaMask also shows a count badge on the icon when something is pending. Alt-Tab, or a look at your other monitor, finds the stray window.

2. An earlier request is still queued

Wallets answer one request at a time. If you left a prompt unanswered ten minutes ago on another tab, the Lighter request goes into the queue behind it and never surfaces on its own. MetaMask's own tracker describes both halves of this: requests stack up with no way to reject them all, and a request sent while the MetaMask screen is already open does not show until you close and reopen it.

Check it: open the extension and clear whatever is waiting, approving or rejecting as appropriate. Then reload Lighter and connect again. The queue drains in order, so the oldest item has to go first.

3. The wallet is locked

A locked wallet cannot sign, so it does not raise a signing prompt. Some wallets show the unlock screen instead, some show nothing in the page at all, and if you unlock in a different window the original request may have already been dropped.

What to do: open the extension, unlock it, then trigger the connection again from Lighter rather than waiting for the old request to reappear.

4. Two wallet extensions are fighting over the same button

If you have more than one wallet extension installed, they can both claim the same injected connection point in the page, and whichever one wins is not necessarily the one you picked. The prompt then arrives in a wallet you are not looking at, or nowhere. This conflict is well enough known that Ethereum standardized a fix for it, EIP-6963, which lets a site discover every installed wallet separately instead of guessing.

Check it: open every wallet extension you have installed and look for a pending request in each. As a longer-term fix, disable the wallets you do not use in that browser profile, or keep a profile that has only one.

5. The page loaded before the extension did

A tab that was already open when you installed, updated, or re-enabled the extension is running against a page that never saw the wallet. The connect button then does nothing at all, because there is nothing on the other end of it.

What to do: close the tab, open a new one, and go to the app again. This also clears a stale page that has been sitting open through a wallet update.

6. The wrong browser profile

Extensions are installed per browser profile, not per machine. A guest window, a work profile, or a second browser will not have your wallet even though the same computer does. The symptom is identical to a broken popup.

Check it: confirm the wallet icon is visible in the toolbar of the exact window you are using.

7. On mobile, the session has dropped

Through WalletConnect or a wallet's in-app browser, the prompt has to travel to a separate app, and that hop is where mobile prompts go missing. MetaMask's mobile tracker records the pattern directly: the signature popup sometimes does not show, sometimes takes 20 to 30 seconds, and sometimes surfaces minutes late.

What to do: switch to the wallet app by hand rather than waiting to be switched. If nothing is waiting there, end the WalletConnect session from the wallet side and start a fresh one.

The order to work through it

What else could it be?

Two failures get confused with this one, and both have different answers.

• Funds that do not appear after a transfer. That is an on-chain question, and the block explorer is the source of truth rather than the app. We cover it in Lighter deposit not showing.
• A prompt that appears and asks for something else. A seed phrase is never requested by any legitimate wallet flow, and a login is never a transfer. Verify the domain before approving anything, and read whether Lighter is safe, and what verifiable actually means here for the wider security picture.

How do you stop it happening again?

Most of this is browser housekeeping rather than anything to do with Lighter.

• Pin the wallet extension so the pending-request badge is always visible.
• Answer prompts as they arrive instead of leaving them open on background tabs.
• Keep one wallet extension enabled per browser profile.
• Reload after a wallet update before connecting anywhere.
• Bookmark the official app and open it from the bookmark, which also removes a phishing route.

None of this touches your balance. A signature you never gave is a login you never completed, and the zero-fee trading waiting on the other side of it is unchanged whenever you get there.