GigaETH Payment Rail Architecture

How borrowed liquidity becomes a live payment balance without breaking non-custodial guarantees.

GigaETH’s payment rail is built on a simple principle: borrowed liquidity should behave like a spendable balance, not a loan waiting to be unwound.

Once a user links LST-backed collateral and establishes borrowing capacity, the protocol exposes that capacity as a continuously available payment balance. This balance may be denominated in canonical ETH or USD stablecoins, depending on user preference and bidder availability. Crucially, this balance is not the result of a one-time borrow transaction. It is a standing line of liquidity.

From a systems perspective, the payment rail sits on top of the borrowing layer and enforces stricter constraints. Borrowing for payments is always overcollateralized, conservatively sized, and continuously monitored. The protocol ensures that spending cannot push a position into unsafe territory in real time. This prevents the classic DeFi failure mode where a user unknowingly spends themselves into liquidation.

At the point of payment, settlement occurs immediately against the borrower’s available balance. Behind the scenes, the protocol allocates liquidity from the bidder pool and records the resulting debt position. This process is atomic from the user’s perspective. There is no separate “borrow” step, no manual approval, and no exposure to market timing.

Importantly, GigaETH does not require users to custody funds with a centralized intermediary. The payment rail operates through cryptographically authorized spend permissions tied to the user’s position. Funds move only when the user initiates a payment, and settlement is enforced on-chain.

This architecture allows GigaETH to integrate with crypto card infrastructure without sacrificing decentralization. Cards become interfaces, not custodians. The protocol remains the source of truth.

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