Ren: MOST UNDERVALUED DeFi Token?!
👨🏫Ren Recap👨🏫
Ren was founded by Australian software developers Taiyan Zhang and Loong Wang in late 2017. Back then Ren was known as ‘Republic Protocol’ and focused on making it possible to do trustless OTC trades. Republic Protocol rebranded to Ren in 2019 and shifted its focus to interoperability, making it possible to transfer cryptocurrencies between blockchains in a trustless manner. The Ren main net launched in May of 2020, making it possible to use Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Zcash on the Ethereum blockchain.
📰Ren Updates📰
In August 2020, Ren partnered with Acala Network to bring Bitcoin to the Polkadot ecosystem. In September 2020, Ren announced they would also be supporting the Binance Smart Chain. In October, the Ren token was listed on Coinbase. In November, Ren unveiled their Multichain upgrade, which foreshadowed support for Digibyte, Dogecoin, Filecoin, and Terra. In February, Ren officially integrated the Binance Smart Chain. They also became a part of Alameda research and will be working to bring wrapped assets to the Solana blockchain.
📈REN Price Analysis📉
In mid-February, REN reached its tentative all time high of 1 and a half dollars, a 10x move. This was likely driven by the announcement that Ren had officially added support for the Binance Smart Chain. Because REN’s only use case is as a bond for Darknodes, its value is highly correlated to the TVL within the RenVM, which has been increasingly gradually over time.
🤑REN Price Potential🤑
How high REN could go seems to depend on the TVL locked within the RenVM. Although this has been increasingly steadily as Ren adds support for new chains, these new chains are not adding TVL. Moreover, renBTC is the primary asset being minted by the RenVM – people do not seem to be wrapping any other supported cryptos. Still, speculation and a low market cap could drive REN higher.
📅Ren Roadmap📅
In brief, the endgame of Ren is to become the interoperability hub for the entire cryptocurrency space. To achieve this, they are planning to do two things. First, they will make it possible to instantly mint wrapped assets thanks to an elaborate p2p loan mechanism which has yet to be implemented. Second, they will make it possible to swap wrapped assets directly between chains instead of having to go through the main chain as a middle man (e.g. unwrap back to Bitcoin, then wrap onto another chain).
👀Centralization Concerns👀
Even though RenVM has nearly 1800 Darknodes, they do not actually have very much power over the network. Almost everything about the RenVM is controlled by the Greycore, a set of 13 Darknodes run by the Ren team. Thankfully, the Ren team has been planning to decentralize the RenVM for some time now, and detailed this process in a Medium post last summer. No date has been set for this yet however, and something tells me that it will be pushed back with each additional chain that is added to the RenVM.
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📜 Disclaimer 📜
The information contained herein is for informational purposes only. Nothing herein shall be construed to be financial legal or tax advice. The content of this video is solely the opinions of the speaker who is not a licensed financial advisor or registered investment advisor. Trading cryptocurrencies poses considerable risk of loss. The speaker does not guarantee any particular outcome.
