New DeFi protocol brings Bitcoin Cash, Zcash swaps to Ethereum

RenVM will allow value to be transferred between blockchains with no centralized authority.

2 min read

May 27, 2020

A new liquidity protocol is bringing Zcash, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to the Ethereum ecosystem.

Ren announced today their decentralized finance (DeFi) product RenVM is live on the Ethereum mainnet. RenVM enables private, permissionless value swaps between blockchains, using a decentralized set of programmatic custodians to transfer assets without a centralized authority.

RenVM will initially bring BTC, BCH, and ZEC to the Ethereum blockchain, providing groundbreaking liquidity between blockchains using smart contract technology.

“In a next-generation financial system where cryptocurrencies are mainstream, blockchains must enable cross-chain value transfer across their respective protocols, and Ren is setting out to provide this catch-all utility,” said Loong Wang, CTO and co-founder of Ren.

Ren raised over $33 million in a 2018 ICO led by Polychain Capital, FGB, and Huobi Capital for a trade order management product that eventually evolved into work on RenVM. RenVM is also supported by the Ren Alliance, a group of more than 50 organizations contributing to the security, utility, and development of RenVM. Prominent members of the Ren Alliance include IDEX, Kyber, bZx, Aave, and more. Members of the Ren Alliance represent thousands of potential users for the new protocol.

“DeFi is all about removing the need for trusted intermediaries, and RenVM provides core infrastructure for DeFi to live up its founding ethos,” said decentralized exchange IDEX CEO Alex Wearn. “Our vision at IDEX is to enable our customers to trade any cryptocurrency without having to trust anyone else with custody of their funds, and RenVM brings us one step closer to that goal.”

RenVM launched today on the Ethereum mainnet, but the protocol is designed to be applied to other blockchains like Tezos or Polkadot. The project uses a similar technique of wrapping and burning tokens on different blockchains to that used to create WBTC. However, RenVM is a fully decentralized protocol for performing these types of value transfer as opposed to the WBTC implementation that relies on trusted third parties.

“Our goal is for RenVM to function as a bridge between not only Bitcoin and Ethereum, but any imaginable pair of blockchain-based tokens, including stablecoins like Libra and China’s digital yuan,” Wang said.

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

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