April Development Update

This month has been a diverse mix of preparing for the next release of RenVM, the upcoming “blockchain blitz”, working with third-party developers (check out the new BadgerDAO bridge if you haven’t already), and designing some brand new functionality.

Let’s jump into it.

Loki

I have talked about Loki a few times already. It is our shiny new testing framework. Over the last month, our investment into building this framework has paid off 100-fold. Using it, we were able to test thousands of transactions, overall combinations of assets and chains, totaling billions of dollars, in a matter of minutes. We also set up an instance of Loki that runs 24/7 on a dedicated server to continuously test the latest release candidate of RenVM, and report any issues.

This not only allowed us to find and squash some subtle bugs, but it also allowed us to load-test RenVM, and represents a change in the pace at which we will be able to test features in the future. Over the last month, we built multiple different “agents” into Loki, which very precisely test a suite of different scenarios. As we make changes moving forward, it will be trivial to ensure that no unexpected changes in behaviour (even if they aren’t buggy ones) accidentally creep in.

We will continue to build more agents and test more and more scenarios. We hope to open-source the framework so that developers looking to contribute to RenVM have somewhere easy — but also very valuable — to begin.

RenVM

For the last month, the development team has been mostly focused on the next release of RenVM, which will begin rolling out early next week. This release is substantial, although most users will not see any significant changes when using RenVM applications. However, developers' lives will get easier, and RenVM will be in a better position to support the large array of incoming changes that we have planned for it. Darknode operators will also (soon after the release) notice that claiming fees will no longer need gas! This particular feature will take a little bit of time to roll out fully but is a long-awaited change, and a big part of our recent RIP to begin a community-governed fund.

The release is planned to roll out over the first week of May, starting first thing next week. As we have always done, this rollout will happen gradually, to decrease the chances/impact of an error. Once the rollout is complete, RenVM will be in a position where it is able to introduce members of the Greycore. We will begin by introducing them on a new Testnet, and once that has proven itself stable, we will introduce them on Mainnet proper. See our roadmap for more information.

Blockchain Blitz

Those that keep up-to-date with the roadmap will have, by now, noticed “the blockchain blitz”. This is the name we have been using internally to refer to the upcoming set of assets/chains that we will be adding to RenVM. Among many other features, the next version of RenVM makes it significantly easier to add support for new assets/chains, and we have also made several key hires that allow us to dedicate more effort to this.

Over the month of May, the development team will be adding support for as many new chains as possible. Every chain is different — at a different stage of maturity, stability, complexity, and even feature-sets — so it is impossible to say for sure which chains will make it into this blitz. However, we are hopeful that we will add approximately a half dozen. These chains will not appear in our official UIs straight away, but we fully expect some third-party UIs to go up pretty quickly.

By next month, the next version of RenVM will have well and truly launched, and we will be working with Greycore members to run the RenVM Testnet for the first time. This is an exciting new step forward for the project and one that we have been working towards for a while now. But we really are still just at the beginning of the project.

In the background, our team has also begun designing some new features for RenVM that extend beyond just cross-chain interoperability. We are exploring various use-cases, ranging from DeFi applications all the way to non-financial scientific computing. It is still too early to say much yet, but keep an eye on this blog series, and jump into our Telegram, and you’ll be hearing about some exciting stuff soon.

Until next time,
Loong

About Ren

Ren is an open protocol that enables the movement of value between blockchains.

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