March Development Update

Published in

Ren Protocol

4 min readMar 31, 2021

Before we dive into the technical updates for this month, make sure to check out the most recent Ren Ecosystem Update | March 2021, because this month saw a lot of announcements and new integrations.

Also, a lot of the technical work this month has been in preparation for our Snapshot RFC and Community Fund RFC. Check out these posts, and let us know what you think.

Lastly, make sure to review our Greycore public roadmap, which is now available so that people can follow along with the latest progress in real-time. Please note, all timelines are subject to change.

Okay, let’s jump in.

Ren Bridge 2

We’ve been working on another major upgrade to Ren Bridge 2. It is now fully open-source and available on GitHub! This upgrade focused on making Ren Bridge 2 as easy as possible to fork, deploy, and maintain independently.

RenVM has recently seen (and will see) some new user interfaces go live. By making Ren Bridge easy to fork, third-party developers will be able to deploy their own user interfaces much faster, and with fewer bugs. This makes RenVM more decentralized, with more independently operated user interfaces that allow users to move assets between chains. But it also helps growth, because native integrations will become more commonplace.

This upgrade also focused on making it easy for third-party developers to keep up-to-date with changes that we make and merge in “upstream changes”, further reducing overhead.

RenVM

We recently promoted our latest version of Devnet to Testnet (in line with our most recent blog post) and began consolidating the multiple different networks of RenVM that currently exist. This brings us one step closer to bringing the Greycore to Testnet, and then eventually to Mainnet. You can see our best-estimated progress in our public roadmap.

This latest Testnet version of RenVM includes two major features: Greycore membership tracking, and native fee tracking. The former will allow Greycore members to accept new Greycore members, one-by-one, or even remove malfunctioning members. The latter allows us to efficiently consolidate fees across all chains supported by RenVM. Once this feature is deployed to Mainnet, Darknodes will be able to earn fees without having to submit Ethereum transactions. This feature has been a long time coming and is estimated to increase Darknode profits by approximately 10% (assuming current gas costs)!

Governance

This month, we have prepared the underlying technology required for the Snapshot RFC and Community Fund RFC. The former will allow Darknodes to signal their support RFCs (Request For Comments) and RIPs (Ren Improvement Proposals), giving community members and developers the confidence to progress these proposals.

This is important because until now, this signaling has been done only through the forum. Using off-chain snapshots Darknodes (the actual machines powering RenVM) can have their opinions faithfully represented. The latter will reduce the costs required for Darknodes to claim their fees. This increases their profits, but also makes room for a community governed fund that can be used to fund third-party developers, grants, or even liquidity programs (really, whatever the community decides).

These RFCs will soon progress to RIPs, where the exact details will be agreed upon, before the implementations are finalized and deployed.

Loki

Loki is a local testing framework that allows us to automatically test a large variety of scenarios (including strange corner cases) on our day-to-day development machines (running an entire network of Lightnodes, Darknodes, and the Multichain). One of its biggest features is the ability to “accelerate time”. It allows us to run tests over the course of minutes that are equivalent to hours — or even days — in a real production environment. This is hugely valuable because it allows us to run extensive test suites in a relatively short amount of time. The end result: more testing, faster release cycles, and more certainty that our implementations are sound and correct.

This month, we finished the first version of Loki and will now begin using it as a core part of our development cycle. In the coming months, we will add more test scenarios, and integrate Loki into our continuous testing/integration pipeline.

New Assets and Chains | Fantom and Solana

This month, Fantom and Solana were added as destination chains to the Testnet. When the next version of Mainnet is deployed, users will be able to send BTC — and other assets — to and fro these two chains.

As you can see, there is lots happening to RenVM at the moment, and the next few months will be an incredibly exciting time. New user interfaces will go live, Darknode expenses will drop dramatically, new assets/chains will be supported, and RenVM will continue to decentralize further.

Until next time,
Loong

About Ren

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