Ren Development Update | June 2022

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Ren Protocol

3 min readJun 16, 2022

Big things are brewing in the Ren ecosystem, with new host chain integrations coming, new assets supported, bridging between host chain supported, an improved explorer, research into supporting EVM applications on Ren, research into increasing scalability and the security and liveness thresholds for the network, and significant developments taking place for more decentralization. Here’s the progress since last time 🔽

RenBridge 3.0 live

RenBridge 3.0 comes with support for wrapping stablecoins and generic tokens between chains, as well as support for bridging renASSETS from one chain to another in one step! This opens up a whole new world of assets to be bridged through Ren, as well as new use-cases with the Bridge transaction type, such as ‘native-to-native’ swaps by pairing bridging with swapping in liquidity pools in one step.

More info in the announcement: https://medium.com/renproject/introducing-renbridge-3-0-2b5f49aaf722

Optimism added to Ren testnet

Optimism, an Ethereum L2 rollup, has been integrated with Ren and is currently undergoing testing on testnet. A full mainnet deployment and integration on RenBridge is expected within the month of June. This will add another host chain to Ren that 30+ assets can be bridged to and from.

New Ren Explorer live

A new version of the Ren Explorer was deployed early in June, which observant community members might have discovered, as among other things it comes with a new design. New features include support for H2H and Bridge transactions, meaning any pending transaction that has not been finished on RenBridge can always be found on the Explorer and completed there. More features will be added to the Explorer to make it even better for users and developers alike. Check it out here: https://explorer.renproject.io/

Incentives RFC

The team published a new RFC outlining how a decentralized Ren network can long-term fund and incentivize Ren ecosystem development, with the goal of bootstrapping a sustainable economy. We highly encourage the Ren community to get involved, provide feedback, and propose changes and ideas, so please check out the proposal here: https://forum.renproject.io/t/rfc-000-037-incentives-for-a-decentralized-network/1231

Security improvements

Over the recent weeks the team reviewed approaches to doing distributed key generation (DKG), which is a key part of Ren’s current ECDSA MPC design and the main component of threshold Schnorr (and EdDSA) signature schemes. It was found that different DKG algorithms could lead to improved security and liveliness thresholds for Ren, as well as potentially better scaling.

Sharding also offers the possibility for better scaling as a smaller number of total players are needed for the MPC within each shard. And sharding with good parameters choices can also offers better security and liveliness thresholds by combining signatures from each shard in a t-of-n approach (at least probabilistically). The team has done some theoretical modelling for sharding in the presence of malicious nodes to help determine system parameters that achieve good improvements.

The next step is to create a prototype of this design, which will be formalised in the upcoming Ren 2.0 whitepaper.

About Ren

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