Lava Free Pay

Digital dollars, also known as stablecoins, are blockchain-based assets that allow you to move dollars globally, instantly, and 24/7. Like ACH or wire transfers, they’re another form of rails for moving fiat currencies. While digital dollars offer a number of distinct advantages over other fiat rails, the user experience has historically been challenging.

Lava Free Pay is a new product from Lava that allows users to interact with blockchains without holding a gas token. This unlocks free, instant, and global payments.

The UX Challenges of Digital Dollars

Digital dollars were supposed to enable seamless, global payments, but so far, using them has been more cumbersome than using centralized finance. To understand how bad the current UX is, imagine that every time you want to send money on Venmo, you first have to buy volatile VenmoBucks, incurring fees, in order to pay an additional volatile transaction fee charged in those VenmoBucks. This is the experience every self-custody user faces today, but instead of VenmoBucks, they have to buy a gas token like ETH or SOL.

At Lava, we believe that users shouldn’t have to face these UX hurdles. Instead, we built a system that abstracts away all of this complexity. The result is the best payment experience using digital dollars— free, instant, global, and always available.

How Does Lava Free Pay Work?

Lava Free Pay enables you to interact with blockchains without having to manage a gas token balance. Anytime you make a transaction through Lava, you create a partially-signed transaction and send it to Lava Free Pay. Lava Free Pay then pays the native gas fee and broadcasts the transaction.

The service is trustless, meaning it’s cryptographically ensured that Lava Free Pay can’t steal your funds. It also ensures that you don’t have to hold a gas token or pay a transaction fee on the network where the digital dollars live.

Getting Started

Lava Free Pay is built into every Lava Vault. To get started, simply download Lava on iOS or Android and follow the instructions within the app to set up your vault. From there, you can deposit funds into your account. You can deposit digital dollars from another account, deposit bitcoin and swap into digital dollars, or deposit dollars from your bank account. Once you have dollars in your vault, you can transact freely using Lava Free Pay.