Lava Loans

Lava is the most secure way to borrow against your bitcoin. Lava Loans allow you to borrow dollars using your bitcoin as collateral, all without giving up self-custody. No need to wait days, sign paperwork, bridge your bitcoin, or trust third-party custodians to take out a loan. All you have to do is set the terms of your loan within your Lava Vault, and you can get your loan capital within seconds.

Unlike other bitcoin-backed lending options, Lava is entirely self-custodial. You control your own keys and never have to transfer your bitcoin to a third party. Historically, most bitcoin-backed lending solutions required users to trust custodians with their bitcoin, exposing them to hacks, rehypothecation risk, insolvency, and seizures. This resulted in more than $24B in user funds lost in 2022 alone. Lending protocols on other chains like Ethereum or Solana require users to bridge their bitcoin, introducing additional custodial, bridge, smart contract, and platform risks. Both options are clunky, risky, and slow.

Lava Loans introduces a better model. We’ve built a borrowing protocol that works entirely on native bitcoin. Taking out a loan on Lava takes seconds, doesn't require paperwork, and allows you to maintain self-custody. Lava is the best option for simple, low-cost, and safe bitcoin-backed loans.

In this article we’ll dive into the key features of Lava Loans, how it is different from other borrowing options on the market, and explain how it works at a technical level.

Key Features of Lava

• Instant loans: No paperwork. Just answer 2 questions and get your loan within seconds.

• Low cost: We minimize costs by reducing loan risk, allowing us to offer the lowest rates on the market. All fees are made transparent at the start.

• Flexible amounts: Borrow exactly what you need.

• No Custodial Risk: Your BTC never leaves your control. There’s no risk of hacks, seizure, or rehypothecation. You can verify this yourself on-chain. Lava is the only loan product where you can independently verify—on-chain and in real time—that your bitcoin is not being rehypothecated.

• No Loan Initiation Risk: Using atomic swaps, your collateral only moves if your loan capital is already secured.

• No Repayment Risk: Repay your loan and your BTC is automatically returned, guaranteed by cryptography.

• Reduced Liquidation Risk: You choose your own blinded, off-chain price source, minimizing the chance of unfair liquidation.

• Bug-Minimized: Lava uses formally verified smart contracts on bitcoin (Discreet Log Contracts), meaning all contract outcomes are known and signed ahead of time. Execution is private and secure.

How It Works

The Lava Loans Protocol is built on top of bitcoin-native smart contracts, called Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs). DLCs enable conditional (oracle-based) contracts on bitcoin, meaning they can execute transactions based on pre-specified and approved conditions. Lava Loans are executed via custom DLCs that allow the borrower and lender to agree to the terms of a loan, enter into a contract based on those terms, and have the contract enforce the terms on-chain— all without requiring a third-party custodian.

DLCs allow for a trust-minimized borrowing experience, and they avoid many of the risks inherent with smart contracts on other platforms like Ethereum. DLCs operate on Bitcoin itself— you don’t need to move your coins to another chain or layer. They also mitigate bug risk because they are formally verified, meaning the output conditions of the contract are known from the beginning. This helps to avoid the exploits commonly seen in Ethereum. Because the contracts use off-chain oracles, they aren't susceptible to oracle manipulation by miners. Not only that, but these contracts are private, customizable (choose your own oracle), and scalable (minimal on-chain cost because execution happens off-chain).

Lava Loans are on-chain contracts between borrowers and lenders. The borrower and the lender agree on a loan amount (in USD), a collateral amount (in BTC), the loan duration, the interest rate, the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio at which liquidation happens, and a data feed (oracle) that will provide the Bitcoin price. When the contract is initialized, the collateral is locked and the loan capital is transferred to the borrower. The oracle feeds the price of Bitcoin into the contract on a continuous basis, and the contract executes according to its pre-defined parameters. As long as the borrower maintains a healthy LTV and repays their loan, their collateral is automatically returned to them upon completion.

Each Lava Loan goes through three phases:

Phase 1: Loan Initiation

• The loan is initialized via an atomic swap; the bitcoin collateral is locked in the smart contract and the loan capital is transferred from the lender to the borrower. Because this is done via an atomic swap, the borrower and lender do not have to trust one another or use an escrow. The collateral moves into the smart contract, and the loan capital is automatically sent to the borrower.

Phase 2: Active Loan

• Once the atomic swap is complete, the loan is active. The bitcoin collateral remains locked in the smart contract, and the borrower has access to their loan capital.

• While the loan is active, the oracle feeds the bitcoin price into the contract on an ongoing basis. This allows the contract to monitor the LTV.

Phase 3: Loan Termination

Once the loan is active, it can terminated in one of the following ways:

• Repaid: If the borrower repays the loan, the collateral is released to the borrower atomically.

• Liquidated: If the loan value reaches a pre-determined LTV or the borrower misses a payment, the collateral is immediately released to the lender for liquidation.

• Expired: If the borrower does not repay the loan before the loan term ends, some of the collateral, equivalent to principal plus interest, is released to the lender, and the rest is sent to the borrower.

• Fail-Safe: In rare scenarios where the loan process cannot be completed as expected due to unresponsive oracles, the protocol has built-in fail-safe mechanisms. These mechanisms ensure that the collateral is not lost.

As you can see, all of the loan terms and conditions are built into the smart contract. The borrower and lender agree on the terms, enter into the loan, and then the contract executes the pre-specified and approved transactions based on either the actions taken by the borrow/lender, or the price changes in BTC. As a user, you can verify at any point that your collateral sits on-chain, is locked in the contract, and isn’t being used or rehypothecated in any way.

Security

Lava Loans are designed to be the most secure option for Bitcoiners who want to borrow against their holdings. Lava’s approach is trust-minimized, bug-minimized, and verifiable for users.

Trust-Minimized

• Traditional platforms expose you to bridge, custodian, or bank risk. Lava lets you borrow against native-BTC directly in your vault. This means there can’t be rehypothecation, funds lost in custodial hacks, or asset confiscation.

• While other platforms require blind trust during loan initiation, Lava uses atomic swaps to ensure your BTC collateral only moves to the escrowed smart contract once the loan is in your hands.

• The uncertainty of receiving collateral post-repayment is a concern with many platforms. Lava uses cryptographic guarantees to ensure that once you fulfill your repayment, your BTC is promptly returned.

• You don’t have to trust a lender who can liquidate your BTC unjustly. With Lava, you choose your off-chain, blinded oracles per loan to provide price data, drastically reducing risks from malicious entities.

Bug-Minimized

• Lava’s bitcoin smart contract is formally-verified, meaning the output conditions to the contract are known ahead of time, minimizing technical risk. DLCs, the underlying technology Lava uses, use pre-signed, encrypted transactions to specify the output conditions to a contract ahead of time. Since all the output conditions to the contract are specified ahead of time, and then encrypted using adaptor signatures, the output conditions are known (money can only move to borrower/lender).

• Lava’s contracts have been audited by the best auditors in the industry, Antoine Riard from thelab31 and Conduition, as well as the core contributors to the cryptography behind DLCs.

Verifiable

• Lava is the only loan product where you can independently verify—on-chain and in real time—that your bitcoin is not being rehypothecated. When you borrow using Lava, you have cryptographic proof, not just legal or reputational assurances, that your collateral is secure.

• Lava’s oracle implementation is open-source.

• Lava’s oracles make daily attestations and calculate a median price across various price feeds to avoid flash crash and unreliable margin call risk.

How Lava Compares

Loan Payments + Fees

Users who take out a Lava Loan pay a one-time origination fee (currently 2%) to open a loan, and each loan has a determined, fixed interest rate for the duration of the loan. Interest rates depend on the length of the loan, but they currently start at 5% annually. Users can also extend their loan by paying an extension fee (currently 2%) at the time that the loan is extended.

Loans that are longer than one month in duration require users to make monthly payments on their loans. Because the terms of Lava Loans are set programmatically in the smart contract, users must make their monthly payments on time in order to avoid being liquidated. You can make your monthly payments using digital dollars (either those held in your Lava Vault, or by depositing USDC into the vault) or via bank transfer. Bank transfers may take several days to clear, so it’s important to plan ahead in order to make the payments on time. Lava offers notifications in advance of payment deadlines in order to allow you sufficient time to plan and make payments.

FAQ

What are oracles?

Oracles are independent data feeds that attest to the price of Bitcoin and feed that price into the contract. At Lava, we’ve built Sibyls, an open-source oracle implementation for bitcoin. Users can choose their own oracles, and oracles have zero knowledge about the contracts they influence. In the case of the Lava Loans Protocol, oracles also make off-chain attestations, and in doing so, this helps us avoid the increased fees and miner manipulation that comes from on-chain oracles. You can learn more about our oracles here.

Why does Lava use digital dollars?

To ensure a fast, trust-minimized loan, Lava uses smart contracts that require HTLC compatibility. Fiat doesn’t support this, so we use digital dollars (like USDC on Solana) — which you can instantly withdraw to your bank account.

What are bitcoin smart contracts?

Bitcoin smart contracts (also known as discreet log contracts) enable conditional (oracle-based) contracts on bitcoin. The way it works is that each party to a contract creates and shares encrypted signatures for each output condition to the contract. Each counterparty has confidence they can decrypt the encrypted signatures and use them correctly at the right time because they can verify the encryption: verify when they can decrypt the signatures and that the signatures are valid.

Bitcoin smart contracts are a better way to do smart contracts because they are secure, private, customizable, and scalable. They mitigate bug risk because they are formally verified, meaning the output conditions of the contract are known from the beginning. This helps avoid exploits you constantly see in Ethereum. Since these contracts use off-chain oracles, they aren't susceptible to oracle manipulation by miners. Not only that, but these contracts are private, customizable (choose your own oracle), and scalable (minimal on-chain cost because execution happens off-chain).

These contracts are zero knowledge in that the blockchain has zero knowledge about the contract, the oracles have zero knowledge about the contract, and the counterparty can verify the encryption without needing the decrypted material.

Where can I learn more?

If you want to learn more about the Lava Loans Protocol, check out the loans paper here: https://github.com/lava-xyz/loans-paper/tree/main

Ready to borrow? Download the Lava Vault on iOS or Android and take out your first bitcoin-secured loan in seconds.