Can you do a multi-currency transfer without it touching Lumens?

Brad

Are Lumens always necessary for multicurrency transactions? The documentation is a little confusing.

For example, look under multi-currency transactions:
https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/explainers/#Multi-currency_transactions

"Conversion through an offer
Stellar finds an offer on the internal USD/EUR exchange for someone wanting to buy EUR for USD and automatically makes the exchange between the two parties.

Using lumens as an intermediary currency
Stellar looks for offers on the network asking for USD in exchange for lumens (the native — purely digital — currency). It simultaneously looks for an offer asking for lumens in exchange for euros. The network makes those exchanges and sends Bob the resulting euro credit.

Chain of conversions
If there are no explicit relationship between offers to buy and sell, Stellar tries to find offers from the network that will lead a chain of conversions from EUR to USD. For example, EUR to AUD, AUD to BTC, BTC to XLM, XLM to USD."

Thus, can you get from USD to EUR without it ever touching XLM?

bkolobara

Brad Yes, you can directly trade USD to EUR.

OrbitLens

Check the Path Payment operation and \paths endpoint documentation: https://www.stellar.org/developers/horizon/reference/endpoints/path-finding.html
If any USD/EUR order exists, it will be used for payment, otherwise Stellar node will try to find any other orders that can be used to close the transfer.