About Renbridge and the RenVM Protocol

Renbridge was a pioneer in decentralized cross-chain interoperability, offering a trustless portal to wrap native cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) into ERC-20 compatible assets on Ethereum and other host networks.

What Was Renbridge?

Launched in 2020 by the Ren Protocol, Renbridge was an application that allowed users to wrap native cryptocurrencies. By locking native assets in a decentralized custodian, users minted equivalent representation tokens like renBTC, renBCH, and renDOGE on smart-contract platforms. This let Bitcoin holders participate directly in the emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem without selling their underlying coins.

How RenVM Powered the Bridge

At the core of Renbridge was RenVM, a decentralized virtual machine that executed cryptographic tasks. Unlike traditional wrapped assets such as Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), which rely on centralized custodians like BitGo, RenVM used a network of decentralized validators called Darknodes. These nodes managed the private keys of the locked assets using Secure Multi-Party Computation (sMPC) consensus, ensuring that no single node or entity ever held complete control of the assets.

The December 2022 Discontinuation

In 2021, the development team behind Ren was acquired by Alameda Research. Following the high-profile bankruptcy of Alameda Research and FTX in late 2022, funding for the Ren project ceased. The developers announced that RenVM 1.0 would shut down, and recommended all users burn their wrapped tokens back to native chains before the network went offline in December 2022. Because of this, Renbridge is now fully discontinued and inactive.

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