Company Name Lava
Founders: Shehzan Maredia
Date of Founded Jan 2022
The location of the headquarters: New York (with some distant employees)
The amount of Bitcoin held in Treasury N/A
No. of Employees 7
Website: https://www.lava.xyz/
Public or private? You can also contact us by email.
Shehzan maredia is working to simplify the custody of Bitcoin.
He founded the company for this reason 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 bitcoin and stablecoins worldwide.
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 believes that those who are not averse to alternatives will be more likely to accept them.
“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 settling on a 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 clarified.
Lava Vault: the self-discipline app that allows you to use dollars or bitcoins, without any compromise in security.
Instant global payments are free
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-custody 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 compatible with all of the major cloud services. Lava ExchangeLava has recently launched a new product.
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. For someone who is new to Bitcoin, the idea of having to move their bitcoins out of an exchange wallet and into a self-custodial one can seem overwhelming. 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.”
Once the user has their bitcoins or stablecoins under self-custody, via Lava they can then use them to conduct transactions with anyone around the globe without requiring permission. Soon, users will be able borrow dollars from their bitcoins without having to give their bitcoins to third parties.
Lava Loans
Maredia has released the beta version of Lava Loans. Maredia refers to it as “a self-custodial form of BlockFi.”
BlockFi is now no longer available. It was a platform which allowed its users to pledge bitcoins as security for loans. BlockFi is a different platform from Lava in that it requires users to surrender their bitcoins to BlockFi before they can use its 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,” Maredia is a shared 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.
The other ways to borrow against bitcoins are also inefficient and costly.
There are hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin secured loans with custodians and with Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)“, he said.
“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 utilizes a particular type of Bitcoin Smart Contract called Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs).
Maredia said that DLCs offer greater security than other smart contracts used on major cryptocurrency 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 clarified.
“[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, mainly because the technology is so new. “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
Contrary to many others in the tech and crypto space, who are hesitant about the future of the technology. “Move fast and break things” Maredia’s team is analytical and meticulous. Before bringing products to market, they prefer to do thorough research and rigorous testing.
“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 concluded.
Lava, a portfolio of UTXO ManagementBitcoin Magazine is owned by BTC Inc., which operates UTXO Management. Bitcoin Magazine, owned by BTC Inc. which runs UTXO Management. UTXO manages a large portfolio of digital assets and invests heavily in a range of Bitcoin-related businesses.
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com