Ren Development Update | October 2022
The main development focus continues to be on Ren 2.0 — the next stage of Ren — that will enable truly native multichain applications, as well as MPC support for EVM contracts. Moonbeam was also added as a new host chain, and Optimism and Arbitrum testnets were migrated to Goerli.
Ren 2.0 updates
Development of Ren 2.0 and writing out extensive documentation for it will continue to be a key priority for the rest of the year as well as early next year. Big news this month regards Ren 2.0’s leveraging of Geth, which will massively reduce the complexity of building out the Ren 2.0 stack, accelerating its development.
Execution and State
Ren 2.0 will be using an EVM layer for all execution logic and state management, based on Geth. The main benefits of this design is the massive reduction of complexity for the system, compared to implementing a new fully-fledged blockchain from scratch. Ren 2.0 can launch much earlier, and safer, by leveraging the heavily tested Geth codebase, and benefits from all the continued development and testing being done on Geth in the future. This month the focus was on translating the current bridging and fee management contracts used in Ren 1.0 from Golang to Solidity.
Darknode 2.0
The new node client that will power Ren 2.0 is being significantly code refactored to improve performance, support the new RenEVM chain, and to future-proof the design so that features added to different modules of the client, like the MPC layer, can be done with minimal worry for side-effects across the modules. That will ensure that upgrades in the future can be done with minimal changes, and safer.
Research
The team is researching ways to further improve the new MPC protocol, particularly when it comes to the security and design of the key management. One feature being explored now is ‘resharing’, which is the ability to let a new set of nodes be able to take over the key management of a previously generated key pair, without compromising on security. This feature would allow Ren to provide users and builders consistent gateway addresses, significantly improving UX and protecting against user mistakes, as opposed to generating new keys (and thus new addresses) at each epoch when validators enter and exit the network.
Ren integrates Moonbeam
We are excited to announce that Ren now supports direct bridging to and from Moonbeam for every asset that Ren supports, such as $BTC, $ETH and $USDC!
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem, mirroring Ethereum’s Web3 RPC, accounts, keys, subscriptions, logs, and more, and extends the base Ethereum feature set with additional features such as on-chain governance, staking, and cross-chain integrations. With Ren supporting it, you can now bridge BTC, DOGE, ZEC as well as tokens and assets from the 10+ other smart contract chains Ren supports directly to Moonbeam.
Start bridging here: https://bridge.renproject.io
Ethereum L2 Goerli transitions
As the Kovan network was deprecated by the Ethereum community recently, Ren migrated its Ethereum testnet to the Goerli network. Optimism and Arbitrum, two L2 networks on Ethereum that Ren supports, also migrated their testnets over to Goerli. So this month Ren’s testnet support for Optimism and Arbitrum was also successfully migrated to Goerli.
