October Development Update

Published in

Ren Protocol

4 min readOct 31, 2021

Welcome to the October Development Update. This month the core development team has been preparing two critical infrastructure pieces within RenVM: an expansion of the Greycore and our developer libraries for Host to Host transactions.

RenJS v3 | Host to Host

With the advent of Host to Host, the Ren team set out to completely overhaul RenJS — the Javascript library that allows third-party dApps to interact with and use RenVM. These changes are significant and have been the biggest update to RenJS to date.

RenJS is now a far more resilient and usable SDK for the ever-expanding cross-chain DeFi world. Let’s dive into some of the key improvements:

1) Streamlined addition of new blockchains
Earlier versions of RenJS relied heavily on Ethereum libraries and types. As a result —

Developers had to import these large libraries even if they were using other chains, for example, Bitcoin to Solana.
Non-EVM chains like Solana were much more cumbersome to build with.

RenJS v3 has been refactored to no longer rely on these libraries outside of its own Ethereum library. This will significantly speed up adding support for new chains in the future.

2) Host to Host support
Support for token assets has required non-trivial changes to the minting and burning flow. This is because tokens are deposited into smart contracts instead of being sent to a gateway address. RenJS v3 now does the heavy lifting to make it easy for integrators to mint and burn these assets.

3) Standardised interfaces
RenJS used to have separate lockAndMintand burnAndReleasemethods. RenJS v3 brings it all under a single gatewaymethod. So developers just have to think about the asset, from and to the chain rather than the particular type of RenVM transaction. This also future-proofs the interface for burn-and-mint transactions following RenVM’s path towards being able to move any value between any chain.

Further, RenJS v3 introduces a standard interface across all chains for submitting transactions and waiting for confirmations, making it easier for developers to add new chains.

RenJS v3 should be available for developers this week. The team will have a standalone announcement for when it's live and we will continue to support RenJS v2 while developers update their integrations. While it’s been a long time coming, we expect this to be the final step before promoting Host to Host to Mainnet!

Airwave

This month marks the beginning of significant improvements for our P2P networking library Airwave. The new improvements make it easier to test, debug, and reproduce issues. We are introducing a new event loop structure to limit the number of background tasks that are spawned. With less concurrent logic and fewer resources shared between background tasks, it is easier to bound resource usage, debug, and inspect for correctness.

This version of Airwave is currently undergoing testing, and we expect to roll out to Testnet over the coming month.

Community Ecosystem Fund

Over the past 3 months, the Community Ecosystem Fund has already accrued upwards of 250,000 USD. This is expected to grow at an even faster pace with the launch of Host to Host (and other Ren Labs projects in the pipeline!).

The development team has started working on a way to make these funds spendable by the community. This will enable more opportunities for the Ren community to become involved and invest in the growth of the Ren ecosystem.

Looking Forward

As noted above, the coming month will be focused on executing the above objectives. There has been a lot of preparatory work up to this point, so we are very excited to be underway and get Host to Host out. As always, we want to ensure it’s done correctly and safely, so the community’s patience is appreciated.

Next month, we will be gathering feedback from integrators, finalising contract reviews, and finally, promoting Host to Host to Mainnet. This deployment will make way for the following release including updates to the Community Fund, Airwave, and more!

With that timeframe in mind, we’ll be modifying the Development and Ecosystem Updates to a quarterly release schedule in order to provide more substantial and consistent updates for the community. This will be supplemented by more frequent and granular development updates by the core devs via this discord channel.

Until next time,
Ren Development Team

About Ren

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