July Development Update

Published in

Ren Protocol

3 min readJul 30, 2021

Another month down, another development update up. This month, we have worked on quite a broad range of things and started a few new items of importance. Let’s dive straight in.

Multichain

This month we worked on several improvements to the Multichain infrastructure, with a focus on performance and decentralisation. The Multichain typically receives lots of similar reads/writes simultaneously — or close to simultaneously — so have begun work on implementing a better caching mechanism to increase the overall throughput by reducing how often the underlying blockchain nodes need to be hit.

We have also started packaging the Multichain infrastructure into an easy-to-deploy system. This should make it easier for third parties to spin up their own instances of the Multichain infrastructure, giving more options to Darknode operators for how they want to configure their machines, increasing decentralisation. Soon, we hope to make this package available to others on various cloud providers.

Airwave

As the network has grown and changed, we have kept an eye on the performance of Airwave and the areas in which it struggles. This month, we began working on several improvements that ultimately seek to improve the stability of the Airwave peer-to-peer network. We have almost hit 2,000 active Darknodes, and now is as good a time as any to assess how our software is performing at this massive scale, and make sure it is able to handle the next 2,000 nodes as they come online too.

RenVM

Last month, we improved the fee system that collects, tracks, and distributed the rewards earned by Darknodes in return for the resource they provide to the network. This month, we added support for this new fee system to the Command Centre, and the last epoch went off without a hitch. We have also worked with Darknode pooling services to design a fee claiming system that is compatible with their varied approaches.

Host to Host Testing

Perhaps the biggest development this month is that of host-to-host cross-chain transfers. That is, sending ETH/BNB/SOL/ERC20s/BEP-20s/SPLs and other tokens between chains. The initial development work for this is now done and is undergoing testing and review! Soon, we will be ready to deploy this long-anticipated feature to Testnet, and before too long, Mainnet. This will be a momentous achievement, as it will mark, for the first time in the history of the project, a time when all functional features have been implemented. We will then focus the remainder of our efforts on bringing new members into the network, increasing decentralisation, and designing new and exciting features/projects on top of RenVM to increase its value and utility to the whole blockchain ecosystem.

Ethereum London

With the Ethereum London upgrade coming soon, this month we dedicated significant resources to testing RenVM and ensuring that the network is prepared for the upgrade. Although most users need not take any action, upgrades of this magnitude can all too easily have unexpected effects on dependent systems. RenVM was designed with this Ethereum upgrade in mind, and we remain confident that we are ready for a smooth upgrade with zero interruptions.

Security

This month has also brought with it a number of severe hacks targeted against cross-chain interoperability protocols, the most recent of which was THORchain. In response to this, the Ren development team has started reviewing its security practices and building additional monitoring infrastructure.

We have also reached out to THORchain, and agreed to help their team review some of their codebase over the coming weeks. All of our projects have the same ultimate thesis: that a multichain world is better than a maxichain world. We all take different approaches with different trade-offs, make different assumptions, and tackle the problem of staging releases differently. This is healthy for the ecosystem. However, malicious behaviour is not, and gives the entire crypto space a bad name.

It is imperative that projects work together to keep safe the funds of our users, and that we do not use each others’ stumbles as a chance to attack each other.

Stay safe out there.

Until next time,
Loong

About Ren

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