June Development Update

Published in

Ren Protocol

3 min readJun 30, 2021

It has been a big month for RenVM, with lots of milestones achieved: the latest RenVM v0.4.4 release is out, the blockchain blitz is coming to an end, and the first general-purpose logic has been deployed to RenVM directly. Let’s jump into it.

RenVM

This month, we put the finishing touches on the latest version of RenVM. It is now fully rolled out on Mainnet with no known bugs or performance regressions. For a system as complex as RenVM, with thousands of nodes, a constant flow of transactions, and dozens of third-party integrations, this is a massive accomplishment. This latest version of RenVM contains all of the learnings from the last year, and I am proud to say that it is the most stable, well-tested version of RenVM to date. We are now, more than ever before, in a position to begin the next phase of RenVM’s life: the introduction of the Greycore.

Gas-less Claiming

One of the biggest features that landed this month was the much anticipated “gas-less fee claiming” for Darknode operators. For those unfamiliar: Darknode operators used to have to spend ETH gas to claim their fees every 4 weeks. This has now been removed and is a significant quality-of-life improvement for Darknode operators. It should boost profit by as much as 5–10% during times of high gas prices (all too common on Ethereum these days).

In accordance with https://forum.renproject.io/t/rip-000-005-launch-a-community-ecosystem-fund/698, this extra margin of income will go straight to an ecosystem fund.

This new ecosystem fund will be controlled by the community Darknodes — a large decentralised network of thousands of participants — to help grow the ecosystem around RenVM. Opening the door to this exciting new growth plan for RenVM will bring with it new paths to adoption, educational material, and new third-party developers.

General-Purpose Logic

However, there is something much more fundamental at play: how exactly this was achieved. All of the fee logic — how fees are calculated, how they are allocated between nodes, how they are slowly released, how they are claimed — is now implemented directly in RenVM as an experimental general-purpose smart contract. This marks the first time that non-interoperability logic is living within RenVM, and is a very exciting feature. As RenVM evolves over the coming months, we will begin to see more and more general-purpose logic make its way into RenVM.

In our pipeline, we now have plans to introduce new kinds of features and applications, beyond simply sending assets from one chain to another, that will be implemented directly in RenVM. This will bring with it entirely new functionality and purpose to an already flourishing network.

Blockchain Blitz

This month we also finished the blockchain blitz, which culminated in the much-anticipated support of Solana. Over the course of the blockchain blitz, we averaged one chain per week. This is an absolutely breakneck pace. Although we will continue to add new assets and chains to RenVM, we will slow down the pace at which we are doing so, and focus on growing adoption on these new chains, as well as new features for RenVM itself.

With this massive month of milestones behind us, there are no signs of slowing down. We now turn our attention to the next three majorly anticipated features: the Greycore, Host to Host — support for sending tokens (ERC20, BEP20, SPL, etc.) between chains (imagine ETH, DAI, and even REN on Solana), and launching of the ecosystem fund. There is a lot of work still to be done, and lots of exciting new developments just around the corner that will make RenVM bigger and better than ever.

Somehow, after 4 years, we are still just at the beginning of RenVM’s life, and discovering everything that is possible.

Until next time,
Loong

About Ren

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