Introducing the Ren Foundation
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce the Ren Foundation, an independent organization dedicated to the research and development of trustless blockchain interoperability.
The Ren project has had the same mission since its inception in 2017: to enable the movement of value between blockchains. It’s based on a shared conviction that bitcoin is our generation’s most promising protection against secular, global currency debasement and that it must be utilizable in decentralized finance to accelerate its mass adoption. For example, if the best monies are those most capable of being sold,¹ and bitcoin should be salable without needing to trust a third party, then bitcoin needs trustless interoperability between blockchains and deep liquidity in decentralized exchanges to be a better, more salable money.
Ren v1
The first version of Ren became the first widely-used interoperability protocol with support for bitcoin. It facilitated over $13 billion in cross-chain volume between 5 UTXO-based and 12 account-based blockchains, including the largest EVM chains, Solana, and Cosmos chains via Kava, allowing bitcoin holders to participate in DeFi for the first time.
It also laid a foundation to test ambitious ideas and assumptions about protocol design, user experience, and economic security. Ultimately, it grew too quickly to progressively decentralize in a responsible manner. But, as with most v1s, the data was crucial to our research and understanding of the design space and will motivate future iterations.
When Alameda Research acquired the initial development team and later filed for bankruptcy, the project lost its development funding, revealing the risks of public good software developed in part by private corporations. Like v1 of the protocol, this experience equated to a v1 of governance, which motivated the community to establish legal entities of its own to steward the advancement, growth, and stability of the project into the future.
Ren Foundation
As a first step, the community formally voted to establish the Ren Foundation. Its purpose is to support research, development, growth, and awareness of the Ren protocol, implementations of the Ren protocol, and its third-party developer and application ecosystems. It was incorporated as a non-profit Cayman Islands foundation company on April 13, 2023, and its formation materials have been open-sourced to ensure incentive alignment with the community.
The Ren Foundation’s immediate focus is on research and development of Ren v2. While most interoperability projects lack support for Bitcoin due to its scripting limitations, the Ren Foundation intends to double down on it. We believe the first step toward accelerating the mass adoption of bitcoin as a global revolution in monetary policy is through a state-of-the-art interoperability protocol that’s designed to meet the trust and security needs of bitcoin users and decentralized financial markets.
We intend to research and develop open-source software but do not intend to run it; the protocol will be community-run from day one should the community choose to do so. While we intend to be active in the community, we do not intend to participate in or exert control over protocol governance, though we will assist in developing the protocol governance apparatus and issue a new governance token. To borrow from the Yearn manifesto, this token will govern the Ren protocol, but not its contributors. As an independent contributor to the project, we will strive to align with the community but encourage individuals to self-organize and build alongside us. In time, we will expand our focus to nurture an inclusive ecosystem for contributors and integrators.
Directors
The first director is David Perkins. He raised a 285K USDT grant from the Ren community to develop the first decentralized staking protocol designed to generate more rewards for node operators without taking fees from other stakers. He was previously a software development lead at Cafe X and has won first place prizes at four hackathons, including TechCrunch Disrupt.
Over the coming months, we will be introducing additional directors. They will help steer the project, advance its underlying technologies, make strategic decisions, develop the wider ecosystem, and push boundaries.
Join us
If our vision of iterating on the state-of-the-art in bitcoin interoperability resonates with you, we are looking to provide funding for motivated researchers and developers to help Ren unlock the next level of bitcoin adoption. We’ve been heads down on our immediate focus since June 1, 2023 with multiple developers from the previous development team as well as some new ones. R&D is already well underway.
If you are a backend or protocol engineer with strong experience in Go and system design and have a general understanding of blockchains and p2p networks, please reach out. If this does not apply to you, but you’re a developer interested in contributing, please feel free to reach out as well.
There is a lot to look forward to. We hope you’ll join us on our mission.
Onward,
David Perkins, Director
¹ Alden, Lyn. “What is Money, Anyway?” March 2022, https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/.
