The Future of Ren
Ren Labs
With the deployment of host-to-host transactions, the original vision for RenVM will be feature-complete, and with the Greycore slowly but surely expanding, RenVM is well on its way to becoming more and more decentralised. This is the perfect moment to look forward and begin planning for what comes next.
Today, we are announcing Ren Labs, a new organisation focused on the next phase of Ren: the growth of a third-party application ecosystem. One that is built directly on top of RenVM and its assets.
Ren Labs will be headed by Jaz and Susruth, two senior developers from the Ren core development team that have worked on the project since the very beginning. Under their leadership and direct support from Alameda, Ren Labs will take on two primary mandates: continuing the development of RenVM into its own L1 that can directly support an application layer, and to explore building applications that are independent of RenVM, but that are built directly on top of it, or that use its assets. Both of these mandates are exciting and ambitious, so let’s break them down.
- — -
Development of RenVM
Developing RenVM involves something that has been rumoured since its very beginnings: becoming our own L1.
Continued development and maintenance of RenVM encompasses some important — albeit less glamorous — points. Ren Labs will take over the role of maturing RenVM: battle-testing its existing features, identifying bugs and fixing them, continuing to review, audit, and open-source repositories, and writing documentation.
But, developing RenVM also involves something that has been rumoured since its very beginnings: becoming our own L1. Right now, RenVM uses complex cryptography to generate and manage secret private keys, known to no one (not even RenVM itself). By doing so, RenVM is able to create an identity on whichever chains it chooses, allowing it to store funds and authorise the minting of ERC20s (and their equivalents). This is how RenVM implements interoperability between different chains. It accepts assets on one chain, and mints a 1:1 representation on another (you can read more about how it works here). But why stop at interoperability?
The ability to generate and manage secret private keys has an infinite world of possible applications to which such a feature can be applied. This exciting class of applications is something that has been discussed in the community for many years, and with Ren Labs, these applications will become a reality.
To make this possible, Ren Labs will continue development of RenVM to expand its capabilities and make it general purpose. This involves making its advanced cryptography programmable and usable for arbitrary use-cases, where bridging chains becomes just one of many types of use-cases. This means any kind of application will be able to be built and deployed directly to RenVM. Applications will be able to live on multiple chains simultaneously. All of this can even be transparent to the user. By becoming its own L1, an entirely new phase of RenVM will begin.
An Ecosystem of Applications
Growing an ecosystem of applications is no small feat. But, the most important mandate of Ren Labs is to do exactly that.
To achieve this, with the support and funding of Alameda, Ren Labs will be building new and exciting applications. These applications will be independent of RenVM (with their own economics, governance, development cycles, and potentially even communities), but they will be built on RenVM and/or leverage its cross-chain assets. This allows Ren Labs to directly grow the ecosystem through active development, but it also serves as a mechanism to help design and battle-test the application layer of RenVM. This means that over the years we will be seeing more and more exciting projects being developed by Ren Labs that showcase new use-cases for RenVM. One such application in active development application is Catalog.
Catalog Finance| Twitter.com/catalogfi
A cross-chain AMM built on the protocol using the first ever boundless liquidity mechanism. This allows liquidity providers from different blockchains to pool their assets into a shared pool. Ultimately, allowing users from these blockchains to trade against various assets without having to think about blockchains and other moving parts.
Catalog will also be the first step in generalising RenVM modules in order to build an automated market making (AMM) solution within RenVM itself. This will be an important catalyst in enabling other general-purpose applications to be built on top of RenVM. Stay tuned for more Catalog news coming out very soon.
Looking Forward | Governance & Community Involvement
With the advent of this new product stream, there will be greater involvement needed from the Ren community and Darknode holders to bootstrap these products. The teams are exploring airdrops for certain products and other ways to incentivize governance and ecosystem participation.
In addition, the most recent addition to Ren governance — the Ren Community Ecosystem Fund — is also something that we envision as a core part of growing the ecosystem. It allows the Ren community to invest in applications independently of Ren Labs, encourage ecosystem participation, and eventually even deploy liquidity.
Together, Ren Labs and the Ren community fund will be able to create a thriving community of developers, projects, users, and of course, cross-chain liquidity.
- — -
After 4 years of intense research and development, the core development team has been able to build the first, the most stable, and one of the most used cross-chain liquidity protocols. With $renBTC and other assets, we have created a network of 1,500 + node operators, brought more than 7.6 billion of previously untapped liquidity to DeFi; along with generating 13.4 million in revenue for network operators.
These are all incredible achievements, and we couldn’t be more proud of the work that we have accomplished. Now, with the introduction of Ren Labs, its taking over of core development, and its mandate to expand the possible use-cases and economics for RenVM, we are at the beginning of another 4 years of excitement and growth.
Onwards and upwards!
Ren Team
