Bitcoin-based Loan Markets, Among Other Dreams With Shehzan

Welcome back to The Gwart Show! Today we are joined by Shehzan, a Bitcoin builder focusing on borrowing and lending protocols on top of Bitcoin. While most people think of Bitcoin as a dumb rock, the Lava team led by Shehzan is working on a novel solution to natively lend and borrow (while maintaining self-custody but we’ll let him explain that) on Bitcoin. Lava uses Discreet Log Contracts (DCLs) to thread the needle of both permissionless capital via DeFi markets and Bitcoin self-sovereignty via self-custody.

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

00:56 Who is Shehzan?

01:29 Why no BTC lending yet?

02:29 What are DLCs?

04:19 Lava vs other lending protocols

05:30 P2P loans complications

06:59 Deposit & loan process

09:20 Privacy implications

11:32 Wrapped BTC

12:44 User risk profile

14:57 Fixed rate loans

17:53 Who are the lenders?

18:19 Oracles

19:42 Choosing oracles

20:49 Rates

22:11 Loan durations

23:13 Target user

25:33 Other chains?

27:21 Solana outages

28:41 Other DLC uses

30:13 Building in Bitcoin experience

32:19 Lightning

33:06 Lack of BTC spending

35:07 Bitcoin's monetary properties

37:48 Wrapped BTC and custodians

41:45 Bitcoin scaling

43:45 OP Codes

46:42 Not enough core devs

47:58 Stablecoins

51:50 Tokenized assets

53:08 Solana vibes

Follow our host: @gwartygwart

Follow our guest on Twitter: @marediashehzan

👋The Gwart Show is proudly presented by Ellipsis Labs! Ellipsis Labs is building foundational products in DeFi. Their first product @PhoenixTrade is the leading orderbook DEX on Solana. The team is growing—visit ellipsislabs.xyz for engineering opportunities.

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