VarenX is now live on Polygon

Gasless Cross-chain swaps with VarenX on Polygon!

Ren Community

Published in

Ren Protocol

3 min readFeb 25, 2022

Excited to see VarenX, the cross-chain swapping application powered by Ren is now deployed on Polygon, with free gas!

Start swapping with free gas on Polygon: https://varenx.com/swap

VarenX was launched on Ethereum a little over a month ago and since then it and RenVM have processed over $1 million in cross-chain volume, with each cross-chain transaction generating protocol fees for the Ren network.

Varen’s goal is to bring cross-chain DeFi to the retail masses. As such, UX is crucial to that mission. With that said, one of the biggest UX bottlenecks was the high gas fees on Ethereum — Now that VarenX is on Polygon with FreeWei, that hurdle has been removed.

Introducing FreeWei

What makes a great UX? No GAS, so excited to see the team at Varen introduce their new feature called FreeWei, which enables gasless cross-chain swaps with VarenX on Polygon.

FreeWei is a new service exclusive to VarenX on Polygon that enables users to execute gasless cross-chain swaps. FreeWei is automatically activated when you execute any transaction including a “mint” coming from a wallet on Polygon. Transactions including a “mint” are:

Mint (e.g.: BTC → renBTC)
Mint and swap (e.g.: BTC → MATIC)
Mint, swap and burn (e.g.: BTC → LUNA)

GaaS | This feature might ring a bell if you’re familiar with Gas-as-a-Service (GaaS). But where GaaS subtracts the gas cost from the incoming asset on the user-side, with FreeWei VarenX fronts the gas costs instead of charging users. This makes cross-chain swaps with VarenX on Polygon free in terms of network transaction costs to the user experience, which is a BIG DEAL.

To learn more about FreeWei, check out Varen’s blog here which explains things in depth. Further, here is a great tutorial link for more info.

Liquidity is Key | Provide Liquidity and Earn Fees

Like on Ethereum, VarenX on Polygon is highly dependent on renAsset liquidity. If you are a BCH, DOGE, DGB, FIL, LUNA, or ZEC holder you can earn trading fees by providing liquidity to these liquidity pools. Just mint the renAsset on VarenX by selecting the L1 asset as input and the renAsset as output (for example for LUNA -> renLUNA) and click on “swap”. About $0.01 later, you’ll have your renLUNA in the wallet and can pair it with some WETH and provide it to the renLUNA/WETH Sushiswap pool on Polygon.

Looking Forward | What’s Next for VarenX & Ren

Deployments to Arbitrum and BNB Chain are on the horizon, but the Varen team would like to observe how VarenX with FreeWei performs on Polygon first before proceeding. Soon after that, they’ll be exploring the implementation of RenJS v3 (H2H)! To learn more about their plan, check this blog.

Improving cross-chain UX is a big industry challenge but one we are focused on achieving here at Ren Labs, so couldn’t be more excited to see this go live! The Varen team continues to deliver and we see this as a big step forward and excited to continue our deep collaboration and see what comes out next from our friends at Varen!

Onwards and Upwards,
Ren Team

About Varen Finance

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