Ren develops interoperable DEFI solution on Ethereum

Ren, the open protocol that enables the permissionless and private transfer of value between any blockchain, announced that its core product, RenVM, is now live on mainnet. RenVM is the only decentralized finance (DeFi) project designed to bring cross-chain assets to the Ethereum ecosystem, beginning with BTC, BCH, and ZEC. By removing liquidity silos that have long hindered DeFi's growth potential, RenVM will serve as a robust and permissionless tool for all of DeFi to utilize.

"Successfully launching RenVM's mainnet is a critical step in our long-term mission of creating a decentralized platform for DeFi that is self-sustaining and advances the industry as a whole," said Taiyang Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Ren. "Generic interoperability has been a thorn in DeFi's side, and we're thrilled that RenVM is now solving this problem by enabling cross-chain liquidity to crypto investors everywhere."

Ren, which raised over $33 million in 2018 from leading venture capital funds and investors, is releasing RenVM with the support of its newly formed Ren Alliance, a consortium of 50+ organizations helping to secure, develop, and utilize RenVM. Together, members of the Ren Alliance – which includes dapps, decentralized exchanges, institutional investors, and other DeFi projects – represent tens of thousands of network participants who can now use RenVM to access cross-chain liquidity and earn a passive yield on their crypto.

"In a next-generation financial system where cryptocurrencies are mainstream, blockchains must enable cross-chain value transfer across their respective protocols, and Ren is setting out to provide this catch-all utility," said Loong Wang, CTO and co-founder of Ren. "Our goal is for RenVM to function as a bridge between not only Bitcoin and Ethereum, but any imaginable pair of blockchain-based tokens, including stablecoins like Libra and China's digital yuan."

In simple terms, RenVM can be viewed as a decentralized custodian: it holds digital assets and then mints a one for one representation on Ethereum as an ERC20. While RenVM currently supports bringing digital assets to the Ethereum ecosystem, the same approach can be applied to other smart contract protocols like Polkadot and Tezos. RenVM's in-house advancement in Secure Mutli-Party Computation (sMPC) allows a set of nodes to store blockchain private keys in complete privacy (even from themselves), creating a virtual machine that can move assets around at the request of programmatic logic without the permission of a central entity. This novel combination of technology allows users to move assets to and from various blockchains, without anyone's permission or the need for a central exchange mechanism.

"What drew us to Ren is the founders' vision for bringing decentralized finance into the mainstream of crypto, and eventually the global financial system," said Sherwin Dowlat, Investments at Polychain Capital, a leading cryptocurrency investment firm that participated in Ren's ICO and is a member of the Ren Alliance. "RenVM is an elegant solution for solving generic interoperability, and we're thrilled to help guarantee the safety of RenVM by serving as a darknode in its semi-decentralized core."

"DeFi is all about removing the need for trusted intermediaries, and RenVM provides core infrastructure for DeFi to live up its founding ethos," said Alex Wearn, CEO of IDEX, a decentralized Ethereum asset exchange and member of the Ren Alliance. "Our vision at IDEX is to enable our customers to trade any cryptocurrency without having to trust anyone else with custody of their funds, and RenVM brings us one step closer to that goal."