Company Name Lava
Founders: Shehzan Maredia
Date founded: The year 2022 is January
The location of the headquarters: New York (with some distant employees)
The amount of Bitcoin held in Treasury N/A
The number of employees: 7
Website: https://www.lava.xyz/
Public or private? Other than that,
Shehzan Maradi wants to make Bitcoin custody easy.
It is for this that he was founded LavaThe app, which he created with his team, allows you to hold your bitcoins without writing down any seed phrases. It also lets you transact in bitcoins as well as stablecoins around the world.
Maredia is one of a growing list of entrepreneurs in the Bitcoin space who believes that seed phrases — lists of 12 to 24 words used to recover funds from lost or stolen cryptocurrency wallets — are hindering mainstream adoption of bitcoin. He is of the opinion that alternative self-custody methods will attract more people.
“I realized that seed phrases were a big barrier to adoption,” Maredia tells Bitcoin Magazine. “and I went down the rabbit hole [to make] something better.”
After months of R&D, Maredia developed a solution that’s now at the heart of the design of the Lava app: Lava Vault.
Lava Vault
Maredia’s team tested a range of different setups for self-custody before arriving at an innovative multisignature solution, which became the foundation of Lava Vault.
“We built this two-of-two recovery solution for self-custody where you can attach one part of the two-of-two to your cloud account and the other is a four digit PIN,” He explained.
Lava Vault is the most secure self-custody application for those who wish to spend dollars and save bitcoins without having to compromise on security.
Free instant global payments
Buy bitcoin at the lowest possible fees
Secure your assets using 2-of-2 seedless recovery pic.twitter.com/nEIYIHD6Dg— lava (@lava_xyz) July 16, 2024
“If I have your four digit PIN, I can’t steal your money because I don’t have access to your cloud account. If I have access to your cloud account, I don’t have your four digit PIN, and I can’t brute force it,” He added.
Maredia, the Lava team and their design is called the Lava Smart Key. They believe it makes self-control easier for people who might otherwise not be willing to do so.
“We’ve actually seen a bunch of people using it that previously would have just bought bitcoin and kept it on Coinbase,” He said.
Lava vault is also compatible with Lava ExchangeLava launched another new product recently.
Lava Vault + Lava Exchange = Auto-Onboarding To Self-Custody
New Bitcoin users often find it difficult to distinguish between an exchange-provided custodial account and a wallet they can manage themselves. Moving bitcoins to a self custody wallet from a wallet provided by an exchange can be overwhelming to someone brand new to Bitcoin. Coinbase).
Lava removes this difficulty, though, as it allows users to purchase bitcoin within the app — at the best rate available — before automatically sending that bitcoin into self-custody.
“We have this exchange aggregator we’ve built,” Maredia is a name.
“If you want to buy bitcoin today, you have to figure out which exchange — Kraken, Coinbase. So, we work with a lot of them. We know what price they offer you based on your order, and we just route you to the best exchange through Lava,” He added.
The bitcoins will appear in the Lava Vault once users have made their purchases.
“This is super useful if I’m trying to onboard users to self-custody,” Maredia is a name. “Now, I can tell them to download directly to self-custody, which largely increases the likelihood that they will continue to use self-custody.”
Users can make payments to anyone anywhere in the world without permission once they have placed their Bitcoin or Stablecoins into self-custody with Lava. Soon, users will be able borrow dollars from their bitcoins without having to give their bitcoins to third parties.
Lava Loans
Maredia, along with the Lava team, recently launched a beta-version of Lava Loans. Maredia calls it a “self-custodial Version of BlockFi.”
BlockFi was now closed down. This platform allowed users use bitcoin as collateral to secure a loan. BlockFi, a defunct platform that allowed users to use bitcoin as collateral for a loan, is the main difference. Users had to hand over their bitcoins in order to access this service.
“Lava Loans is the first way to borrow against your bitcoin without giving it to a custodian or bridge,” Maredia is a name.
Maredia developed this product after he saw the need for it, and also wanted to have something similar for himself.
“There’s a lot of Bitcoiners who don’t want to sell their bitcoin,” Share Maredia.
“I don’t want to sell my bitcoin either, because it’s appreciating. I’d rather borrow against it at a lower interest rate than it’s appreciating,” He added.
He noticed also that other borrowing methods against Bitcoin are expensive and inefficient.
The loan custodians are securing billions in dollars with bitcoins. Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)He explained.
“To get Wrapped Bitocin, you have to take your Bitcoin, KYC yourself, put it on an exchange, pay fees to mint it, pay a bunch of network fees to move it onto Ethereum and then once you’re done using Wrapped Bitcoin, move it back to your exchange, pay extra fees to unwrap your Bitcoin and move it back to self-custody. And you probably have tax obligations for wrapping your Bitcoin, too,” He added.
“I want to get these people using native bitcoin. We can increase the market size of people who are using actual bitcoin as collateral.”
Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs)
Lava Loans uses a type of Bitcoin smart contract called Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs).
Maredia explains that DLCs can be safer than other smart contracts used on major crypto networks.
“DLCs are interesting because you’re basically just using the Bitcoin layer one to lock your Bitcoin and release it under some predefined set of conditions,” He explained.
“[As opposed to] smart contracts on Ethereum or Solana that constantly keep getting hacked, DLCs are basically a bunch of pre-signed transactions that you encrypt. You almost get formal verification of your system by default, because you know that the money that’s locked in the smart contract between you and your counterparty can only be moved under this predefined set of conditions that you have verified,” He added.
“So, there’s a lot less technical risk versus writing arbitrary code deployed on the EVM that anyone can poke around with and exploit.”
Maredia shared with us that Lava is a team of engineers, many of whom contributed to the early DLC standard.
“There’s probably like 10 people, a lot of which work at and contribute to Lava right now, who know about this tech,” Maredia explained that DLCs have yet to fully realize their full potential, largely due to the fact that they are a new technology. “Not too many people know about [DLCs, but] that’s because the tech is early and we’re building it.”
Keep Things Safe by Moving Slowly
Many in the crypto- and tech world take the view that the cryptocurrency is a scam. “Move fast and break things” Maredia, and his team take a very analytical approach. Maredia and his team prefer to test their products thoroughly before they bring them to the market.
“We’ve been doing a lot of R&D over the last two years,” Maredia is a name.
“We were experimenting with lots of things. Even before we built Lava Smart Key, Lava Exchange and Lava Loans, we had been experimenting with a lot of different ways to do loans, to do self-custody security and to do on-ramp and off-ramp,” He added.
“This new self-custody security solution is a product of the last eight to ten months of experimentation.”
Maredia stated that Lava Loans may be months from being launched, but the beta product is working well. It has also provided him with feedback.
“Everything’s coming together,” He said.
Lava is part of the portfolio companies UTXO ManagementBitcoin Magazine is owned by BTC Inc., which operates UTXO Management. Bitcoin Magazine, owned by BTC Inc. which runs UTXO Management. UTXO is a Bitcoin investment firm that holds significant digital assets.
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com
