Introducing Lava Cash

Published on: 09.05.2021

Lava Cash is the first privacy preserving smart contract on Solana.

Lava Cash is a non-custodial smart contract that utilizes zk-STARKs to break any deterministic links between funds that have entered the “Lava Pool” from those that have exited.

The basic flow of this protocol has been deployed and widely tested by popular smart contracts on multiple blockchains. The primary distinction between Lava Cash and these predecessors is our utilization of zk-STARKs instead of zk-SNARKs. This brings a number of benefits, the most significant of which is the shedding of a trusted setup ceremony in favor of publicly verifiable randomness.

While this contract is an excellent choice for users moving SOL between private addresses, we envision a future in which the “Lava Pool” is additionally utilized as a building block in composable smart contracts. Instead of the transaction graph exposing all inter-contract settlements, an obfuscated web of contract interactions would be anchored to the Lava Cash contract. This for example would increase the difficulty of reverse engineering proprietary on-chain trading strategies and other competitive intelligence.