Lava — isolated pairwise lending
When Magma surfaces it splits into channels, each one sealed in its own walls. Lava is isolated lending: one collateral, one borrow asset, one market — and a blowup in one channel never reaches the next.
One channel, one pair
A Lava market is a single pair: lend one asset, accept one collateral against it. "I lend WETH and take Sand as collateral" is a market; SOT <- USDC is another. Each pair is content-addressed and immutable — its oracle, its rate model, its loan-to-value tier are sealed into the market the moment it is forged and answer to no one after. A different oracle is not a tweak; it is a different channel.
Walls that hold
Cross-margin pools share one reservoir — that is Magma, and it is its own page. Lava is the opposite discipline: every pair is walled off from every other. Bad debt, a stale oracle, a collateral that craters — the damage is contained to the one channel it occurs in. Lend only into the risk you chose to stand next to, and nothing leaks across the rock.
- ▸Risk is bounded by the pair, not the portfolio
- ▸Each market has its own LTV tier — stables run hotter, volatile assets tighter
- ▸A market's terms can never be changed once forged
- ▸List an exotic pair without poisoning the safe ones
The Cascade, and who it pays
When a borrower crosses the maintenance LTV, the Cascade pours: a keeper pays the loan asset, takes the collateral, and clears the debt. The 9% liquidation fee does not vanish into the protocol — it stays in the channel as loan tokens and is socialized to that pair's lenders. You are made whole on principal, paid your interest, and paid the fee, all in the asset you lent. No swap, no AMM hop, no cross-asset detour.
Where it lives
Lava runs on the MagmaPairs contract, live on Arbitrum Sepolia, reachable from the /magma surface in the app. To lend, pick a channel and supply the loan asset — you earn interest plus the Cascade fee from that pair alone. To borrow, deposit collateral into a channel and draw the loan asset up to its origination LTV; top up or repay on your own clock, human or machine. Read the pair before you enter it: in Lava, the channel you choose is the only risk you carry.