Going Live with RenVM v0.4
This article will provide an overview of the upgrades taking place as part of the release of RenVM Mainnet V.04. The upgrades improve a variety of elements within the protocol, which are expanded upon below.
- Enabling Greycore activation
- RenVM fee improvements
- Streamlining of support for new blockchains
Greycore Activation
This upgrade collates and implements all of the improvements we’ve added to RenVM since its release in May 2020. What this ultimately means is the Greycore is now ready for primetime and we’ll begin adding Greycore Members to the Testnet over the coming weeks to ensure a proper testing cycle before we move them to Mainnet. Once that process has proven itself stable, we will introduce Greycore on Mainnet.
We’ll have standalone announcements for when new members are added to Greycore Testnet along with periodic updates for the community.
RenVM Fee Improvements
This upgrade allows RenVM to store and distribute fees directly within RenVM, instead of hosting and distributing them through Ethereum (and other host chains). For the Darknode operators, this means: ETH gas will not be needed to claim rewards, resulting in a more cost-effective fee claiming system, and greater profits. The upgrade should increase network revenue by approximately 5–10% (depending on gas costs).
This particular feature will take a little bit of time to roll out fully, but we expect the current epoch to be the last that needs ETH to claim fees! This is a long-awaited change, but it is also a big part of and prerequisite for our recent RIP to begin a community-governed fund. Lastly, it has also required the team to begin developing basic smart contract capabilities into RenVM. Although these capabilities are still very much in their infancy, it marks the beginning of smart contracts that are native directly to RenVM itself.
Streamlines New Blockchain Support
The v0.4 upgrade makes it significantly easier to add support for new assets/chains. Over the month of May, the development team will be adding support for as many new chains as possible. Having said that, 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’ll add approximately a half dozen new chains. With so many chains supported, we will then turn our attention to sending assets between host chains. For example, sending ETH/ERC20s to Solana, sending SOL/SPLs to Ethereum, and so on.
Looking Forward
As with all major upgrades for RenVM, v0.4 is being rolled out gradually to decrease the chances of bugs, as safety always takes precedence. With that said, most of the above features are either live across the network, part of the network or being prepared for deployment as we speak. We will continue to announce more information/instructions about individual features as needed.
This is a long-awaited and important step for RenVM to improve performance, cross-chain offerings, and decentralization, so we couldn’t be more excited to have this milestone underway.
Until next time,
Loong
About Ren
Ren is an open protocol that enables the movement of value between blockchains.
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