DeFi by Design EP#7: Interoperability & Cross-Chain Future With Ren Protocol

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich what's up guys just want to take a quick break and tell you about our sponsors for defy slate so first we have acropolis acropolis is an all-in-one defy yield farming platform they actually offer dollar cost averaging into bitcoin and ethereum uncollateralized loans and their mainnet just launched it's called delphi and they actually just filled it up to a cap and they have governance launching soon check out acropolis.io for more and then we have mcdex mcdex is the first decentralized perpetual swap exchange they offer up to 10x on

ethereum perpetual swaps and 5x on link as well as lend and snx completely decentralized trading check them out on mcduck dot io both these platforms are extremely active in the d5 space and their protocols are growing and the users are as well so check those out and we'll get right back to the podcast now [Music] what's going on guys welcome to episode 7 of the d5 by design podcast we are here with andrew and michael from ren protocol absolutely excited for this one ren has been on our radar for months now absolutely great project and we are here with rob how you doing today rob i'm doing well andy definitely excited to have ren on the podcast i know we've talked to

you know quite a few protocols but ren has some unique differentiators that i'm interested in hearing about they're certainly you know around d5 quite a bit and you know where we might have been focused on the liquidity farming i i'm definitely excited to hear more about collateralization and everything about wrapping bitcoin and the rent protocol as well so excited to have them on yeah awesome awesome so we have andrew and michael here today we'll let them intro themselves and explain how they fit with wren and we'll dive right into it hey guys yeah pleasure pleasure um being here and thanks for having us so yeah michael burgess oversee operations here at wren i've been with the organization since early 2018

um so it's definitely been been a fun journey um but yeah thanks for having us and looking forward to it yeah um yeah thanks for having us uh my name's andrew i'm head of integrations for run then i joined uh at the start of this year you know kind of a couple months before before midnight hit and been it's been a it's been a great ride so far excited to talk to you guys awesome awesome all right well let's start it off with uh an interesting question for those who have been keen to the the concept of the total value locked in these d5 protocols right so if you go on d5 pulse um you can see the all of all the rankings of all the protocols but one thing that stands out about ren is

that the way that this concept of total value locked in ren it's a bit different than say ave or compound um right so could you briefly explain to our listeners kind of what does the idea of total value locked in ren mean and kind of how is it a lot different from those of a more of a borrowing and lending protocol like ave sure um yeah i can take this uh so the total value locked is kind of two two parts there so the first is i'm just going to go off of the d5 pulse kind of how they measure it so they measure in two components the first is how much value or how much rend is bonded in the network and is running dark nodes so right now we have over a thousand dark nodes so they're counting kind of that value

locked so the amount so in order to run a dark node you need to have 100 000 run and you need to bond that in order to you know be able to participate in the network so that's kind of one area of total value locked however the real value of total value locked is the amount of bitcoin zcash and ecash that is currently under run vm's custody so the way people use uh renvm is that they give run vm custody of their assets that aren't normally compatible with ethereum and then renvm will allow them to mint a one-to-one representation of that onto ethereum so anytime somebody has run btc there's a a one-to-one matching amount of bitcoin that's in run vm's custody so the total value locked in red

vm when it comes to kind of other people's assets is going to be you know that the the total bitcoin bitcoin cash and zcash that's under ram jam's custody and then you know d5 pulse guys also kind of count the total ren bonded and the network is also kind of a value locked in the system right right so you guys are kind of like the bridge in between the ethereans and their whole idea and the bitcoin maximalists and their maximalism so you guys are a bit of like this bridge here and i think these two communities are very strong and polarizing um and i mean there's been a lot of debate and whatnot on twitter so how do you guys kind of manage that idea right like in the team in the protocol like how do you guys go about on a day today with

this idea of bitcoin maximalism and bitcoin and just kind of like those two ideas that kind of they often times will butt heads and fight yeah i mean i think you know the maximums are you know kind of a bit silly i mean really what run vm does is it brings utility for both of these assets you know it provides more utility for ethereum right it has all these cross chain assets that are that are bringing more liquidity into the ecosystem and for you know the bitcoin guys they have you know now they have an opportunity to earn yield on their bitcoin in addition to maintaining price exposure um so i mean i i really think you know it benefits all all parties involved in fact um so that's kind of the stance we take we're very agnostic

and you know there's other maximus out there you know there's you know the polka dot guys and all these other ecosystems right and again we're just bringing more utility to these ecosystems so yeah i think it's it's really a benefit to the space at large yeah i think the to pick up back off of that i think it's a a pretty common belief but nobody really talks about a lot which is that there's kind of a silent majority out there that really doesn't care too much or at least we'll be open-minded to the functionality of using bitcoin on ethereum to earn some extra yield and that the loudest people on twitter are the vast minority of people that hold you know bitcoin and want to want to use it on there right so i think we've seen that play out with our attractions so far

yeah it does seem like the tribalism tends to increase when prices start to go up uh that kind of triggers you know people getting into their own bubble of some sort but you know how does ren kind of play into the interactions with these different protocols because it's kind of an arm on its own because it brings in bitcoin where a lot of these other l2 protocols are focused on collateralizing erc20 tokens so you know without getting too technical how does ren integrate with some of these other protocols to produce the most yield you know whether that's on bitcoin on ethereum for whatever combination sure yeah so i can start at a high level of what run vm is and how its model kind of

fits into this and i could kind of explain how people are using it right now with bitcoin ethereum um that'd be great yeah so run vm is a place where people park their assets and as they move it across blockchains so for instance i give them vm custody my my bitcoin and then red vm is kind of this almost like a trusted third party to the ethereum chain but because run vm is a network no one person can kind of control this quote unquote trusted third party but essentially users are parking all different types of assets in this custody and then run vm because it returns a signature that kind of verifies hey you know i've received this amount of money in kind of a decentralized way you're able to basically print one-to-one representations of the value that it has on all sorts of

different other blockchains i know it's a little bit abstract but you can think of it almost as a decentralized custodian so this allows us to do bitcoin on ethereum right now but for instance you'll be able to put you know say another coin onto you know a destination chain like polka dot or anything else like like that and so what users are doing right now is they're saying okay i'm going to give bitcoin over to run vm run vm is going to after six confirmations gonna return back information that verifies that deposit and then i take that information and i print myself one-to-one representation and run ptc then i go and i use that run btc on ethereum because it's now in in the ethereum file format to lend out and to maybe borrow against and so what we're seeing is bitcoin is a really

really good collateral because you know it's fixed supply and because of its you know kind of tremendous amount of liquidity and on the centralized world and people want to borrow it to to collateralize different positions and things like that in d5 so we think yeah oh sorry i don't say we think i think bitcoin is actually a phenomenal type of collateral that can be used in d5 which has normally been reserved for say uh ethereum or some other assets yeah and i'll piggyback off that a bit as well i mean here's a kind of another way to think about how how we position ourselves we so run vm is really bringing interoperability to d5 right versus you know building an l1 and then asking people to build on us you know i mean kind of like the polka

dots and the cosmos is i mean we're essentially you know bitcoiners don't have to do anything the ethereum folks don't have to do anything we're pretty much you know working with their file formats right if you will um so that that advantage from a ux perspective has i think is one of our major advantages right um so you know bitcoin you can't really build on bitcoin right so you just kind of have to accept it as it is and yeah working with all these legacy assets i think has has really provided a unique advantage that the mdm has yeah so i'll leave it at that yeah i mean i was using it like maybe two weeks ago just for a very simple transfer and i mean it's so simple and to me it's like at this point if you're aware of what's going on in d5 and you have bitcoin why would you

not try to take it and put it through the vm and then use it either in curve or even in urine soon right like like why would you not try to earn yield and the only thing that i could think of was the risks and so on my mind it's like okay so i can have my coins in a ledger super you know extremely safe probably the highest form of safety but what is it that we can basically do for either awareness or marketing to other people who own bitcoin and bring them you know to the ethereum chain through rent right like how can we explain these risks in a concise way and then also like try to advocate for the usage of having people effectively put their cold storage or their bitcoin to work

and make it a productive asset have you guys thought about your marketing or your angles in that sense to speak to those who just have this bitcoin on a cold wall that's not really doing much right right yeah i mean i think the you know the easiest thing just to attract someone to to utilize run vm and run btc is really the yield at the end of the day it is that utility that that we mentioned you know by you're maintaining exposure to bitcoin but you're also earning this extra yield and that is just you know a wicked attractive and and we've seen um you know that that kind of play out over the last few months right and as for the risks i mean our cto always says this you know the safest place for bitcoin is always going to be on the bitcoin chain any custody any

solution wbtc you know run btc and any variant that kind of follows this custodial model there is some some inherent risk right you have bitcoin uh chain risk you have the ethereum chain risk and then you have you know a custodial risk on top of that right so you are compounding risk by by doing all these things and that is kind of why the yield is so high at this point i mean we're taking a very measured approach to all this you know we're kind of making sure we're auditing all our code piece by piece we're opening sourcing it piece by piece so if a bug is indeed discovered you know it's it's isolated to that specific repo right so trust and safety is really gained over time and we're taking a slow and measured approach um and then of course you know we'll be

you know speaking to this uh as our as our code comes out and all this good stuff over the coming months um so so i think time is is really the best metric for assessing trust right that the longer we go without an issue the better right so that's really our our model here and andrew feel free to jump in on that if you'd like yeah yeah um just to kind of emphasize like i think a big number that says eight percent yield on your bitcoin that is that is the best marketing we can have and i think also on maybe on a minor point also like all the different um because if you think about d5 right now d5 is a competing version of some of the more centralized versions you've seen such as um you know at the calm up and they've got like block files this

tremendous success and kind of other centralized places where you can give them your bitcoin and then you know yield on that however you know if you're a centralized company you know you have to do you know kind of invasive user verification that's kind of archaic and not really that effective that's kind of one other you know every time a company gets hacked and user data is leaked that's another marketing event for defy in a lot of ways yeah and michael you mentioned kind of the best remedy for trust is time i thought that was a great point that you made i know i i certainly take that position when i try to understand these new protocols that come out you know i often try to relate them to something else that's been out before because d5 and cryptocurrency moves at

such a fast pace that it is sometimes difficult to you know keep up if you try to understand things independently without building on one another so you know to try and i guess minimize that blind trust and give people some more insight you know part of that is education and making sure that your audience understands kind of the interworkings of the protocol so could you just i guess i'll give a little explanation and if you could correct me if i'm wrong uh just to you know better summarize some of the other ways that people might understand ren it sounds a lot like maker dao where there's an algorithmic peg to a stable coin and you know you mint off this collateral but in the rend protocol you're minting

from bitcoin to rent bitcoin so could you maybe explain some of the similarities and differences and if you know that one to one between bitcoin and ren is always kept or if it's more of an algorithmic peg like we see with dye and maker down yeah i think actually the easiest way to think about run vm and run btc is really to to model it after the wbtc model right so wbtc takes the bitcoin they custodials it bitco custodials it and then they meant a one-for-one representation that is literally pretty much the exact same thing run vm and run btc does right we take the bitcoin it's custodialed but it's custodialed in a decentralized network right so that private key isn't

held in one node it's held in multiple nodes and it's split up into kind of thousands of little pieces and any time there's another burn they kind of reconvene and you know combine that that private key and allows run vm to mentor burn btc so i think actually that's a better kind of reference point in fact so it's not algorithmically pegged or anything like that it really is just just a decentralized custodian that takes custody of assets as they move in between blockchains and that actually sounds like a much better format which you know maker dow has that soft peg or that algorithmic peg but i know people especially in d5 now as it continues to grow people are worried about that fractional

reserve banking philosophy being translated into d5 so something like you know rap btc or nbtc that you know simply just collateralizes it and shifts custody i think has a quicker path to trust and you mentioned time you know is the best remedy i think people are a little bit more trusting of something like that because it's easier to understand you know okay the custody has shifted but you know my money is still my money essentially i still have ownership of my money right and and yeah i think we've seen that with wbtc i mean fun fact we actually helped start wbtc back in early 2019 i think january 2019 it was ourselves kyber and biko right um and at first it really didn't gain a lot of traction a

lot of people were kind of put off by the fact that there was a centralized custodian and you know it didn't it didn't really gain that much traction i think really since 2020 it's it's really quite taken off um and that is you know it's it's had a year of success and no i mean they're not freezing anyone's addresses no hacks or anything like that and you know it goes a great organization right so so they run a tight ship and i think that is actually an example of how time you know does kind of convey trust over a certain period right yeah so i'll leave it at that and andrew feel free to feel free to add anything in yeah i was curious as to like if you guys were like friends or competitors or or if you guys collaborate how does that work because ultimately at

this point there is really two choices that i've seen from my experience to bring in any form of bitcoin on a theorem it's either rap bitcoin or run bitcoin so what's the relationship like there if there is one i mean you just said how you guys helped them build but like to this day kind of what's the relationship there yeah it's certainly amicable i mean we're big fans of the team and like i said we've been working with them for quite a long time and uh really what i see it we complement each other really at the end of the day right so there's some institutional you know organizations that would actually prefer to work with wbtc because if something happens they they have someone to sue right um and in our case that you know it certainly is it's just not possible so you know for certain clients wbtc is

going to be a better fit and for certain you know other individuals run btc is going to be a better fit so so we certainly we think there's room for both um and we actually think they complement each other and in fact you know we build er andrew built a wbtc cafe which i'll let him touch on and and kind of the benefits there yeah i've never heard of that that sounds interesting what is that yeah so so with run vm you know you can basically use run vm and run btc in a very composable way which means you can actually use minting run btc as kind of a one lego piece and a more complicated set of actions on chain you know and and what you can do here is what we did is we set up a a rap bitcoin to run bitcoin pool on curve so this is a

liquidity pool where you can basically swap around btc for rap bitcoin or rapidly for brand bitcoin at very low slippage and then what we did is we said okay we built a ui and said hey send bitcoin to this bitcoin address and now out the other side you'll get rapidly and under the hood what you're doing is you're actually doing two steps you're doing the first step of getting run btc and then you're immediately swapping that for rap bitcoin and then and then getting rapidly on the other side of there and so what what's cool there is that the it's usually gets the best of both worlds right you know run bitcoin win you know vm wins because we get the volume red bitcoin gets an easier user experience you know users aren't really minting rap bitcoin they're just kind of swapping at a little slippage

and the user gets kind of you know a better user experience and also the the kind of the piece of the extra piece of mind that they want with with rapidly in there so we kind of see he's like at the end of the day like like if you're going to hold a gajillion dollars on jane like maybe rapidwin might be and you're doing that on behalf of say other clients other third party clients like maybe you're going to want rap bitcoin because it has that kind of extra real world insurance however if you're using it for decks or using for some of these more complex situations you know run btc might actually help you get the job way way faster and way more capitally efficient nice i didn't quite realize that rap bitcoin was actually a more centralized version of random you know obviously it's a lot different but

that's good stuff there so this one's actually from the community so we put out a poll and we asked what they would be more interested in hearing from the options were the future of renbridge um when ren moon and a few others but the one that we got the most interest from was the future of renbridge so i'm assuming people are interested to hear about if there's going to be more assets that we can bring onto ethereum how is renbridge going to improve over the next six months or year um and kind of like what the future is looking like so do you guys have any insights that our audience would like to hear yeah absolutely so we're working on run bridge 2.0 in fact as we speak now we're getting the design files going and all that good stuff um so we're pretty excited to have it out

and really there's a few things we're working on first and foremost is adding more assets right you know adding the dogecoins and you know another layer or excuse me another destination chain like polka dots so allowing individuals to move assets you know to ethereum but also to polka dot as well so we're expanding our our assets that are supported by run vm and red bridge will be um an avenue to to do that right and then second second of all is really ensuring that it is as easy as possible to use because we are kind of adding a new dynamic to things right we've got bitcoiners that have never used metamask or they're paid for gas you know with ethereum so we're trying to simplify we're trying to make it like dead symbol basically so it

cannot be messed up right but you know we've you know since it's gone out we've seen you know some people sending bitcoin to the wrong address and like forgetting that they have to have you know gas to actually complete the transaction and all that stuff so yeah we're trying to streamline it a bit make it super simple so it really does become this universal tool to to move assets to different chains um so yeah we're excited for that and it should be coming out pretty soon yeah i think we're we're kind of in uncharted territory here we're going to be quickly approaching that where you know on red bridge you know kind of for the first time you're going to be able to fluidly transfer value like between ethereum and polka dot directly or bitcoin and polka dot you know kind of like all these crisscross

different combinations there it's like we've kind of interoperability's kind of been a thing for a little while now in the blockchain space but nobody's really truly done like a general purpose interoperability for pretty much all chains in every chain and uh and i think you'll see on redbridge you know uh interesting ux and ui that kind of helps users do that exactly that so yeah we we've certainly seen interoperability attempted before in some of these different coins and these different protocols but it hasn't been seamless and it hasn't been fluid we were talking i think andrew before you got into the zoom room we've had like 20 failed transactions andy mentioned his and i i know i've had quite a few myself so it's difficult you know to to keep all of

you know what what you need whether it's ethereum or gas to support a transaction you know you need to be aware of all those things so some of the ux's that are out there now don't offer that so i'm sure it's really going to be an attention grabber when ren bridge 2.0 launches for sure and and it takes a ton of work just to get the basics like really smooth like on redbridge just going kind of to and from it like under the hood like there's just a ton that can go wrong and so i i kind of equate it to because i came from kind of the traditional fintech world and it's kind of like if you were building instagram and when you're uploading the photo like half the time the cell network would just the the wireless radio would just like go out like that's like that's like some

of the stuff you kind of have to deal with sometimes like sometimes users submit a transaction it just doesn't doesn't get picked up by ethereum and then now we have to handle kind of this weird crazy situation so so getting the basics is kind of tough but i think we we've been well uh we've been able to do i think pretty well so far and i think when we add more destination chains yeah it'll be it'll be it'll be fun cross chain everything cross chain it all everything what uh is there an eta for the uh for the 2.0 so no no concrete eta but what we're shooting for for this fall cool cool cool cool yeah that's awesome would you guys be open to telling our audience about that transfer today the milestone on the ren network and

kind of how those type of transfers and all the activity in the vm help to accrue value for the rent token itself because nowadays there is this idea and stigma and philosophy of if the token isn't accruing real value then what is it worth so i'm sure we'd love to hear about kind of how ren accrues value through the ren vm um and about the milestone that you guys had today yeah so i think right right before we hopped on this podcast i think we had our highest mint to date so that's you know a thousand btc moving through run vm um so pretty pretty psyched about it um and you know we've been seeing a lot of those lately with the advent of curve and all that good stuff um so yeah super excited um now with that said i mean really i

think run vm and the rent token holders and then by virtue of the dark node um or those who run dark nodes can see in real time the value that's that's accrued right so for that you know 1000 btc transfer um you know 10 bits of that is going to all the dark note holders and it's being split evenly and it's in real time so every time someone moves an asset across run vm you know you can see a fee being accrued essentially and i think that that tangible takeaway really is i think kind of unique you know i don't see a lot of protocols that can show that to their users um and and again i mean it's it's real it's not like we're you know you're getting btc as the fee it's not like you're getting some

inflated token or something like that as a result uh everyone that runs a dark node gets their fees in the assets that's transferred right so you get real btc real z cash and real bitcoin cash every time it moves across the bridge so i think that's pretty unique and and we've seen it you know obviously been been well received by the community and i think to this date and andrew correct me if i'm wrong but uh i think you know dark nodes are pretty much earning around five percent apy as of right now so i mean it's been it's been quite successful so we're pretty happy about it so do just a little bit on you know the the inter workings is is it a payday essentially for a dark uh node each time that someone mints

renbtc yeah yeah so we the fees are collected and distributed on a monthly basis so you know you don't extract them at that moment right that the fees kind of occur throughout the month and then every every epoch it's basically you know it's a 30-day time period those fees are distributed to dark nodes and they can keep them in our you know our command center which is kind of the user interface we use to manage dark nodes they can keep it in there or they can withdraw it at the end of every month yeah so that so that's it gotcha and andrew kind of bringing it back to interoperability you mentioned kind of all of you know the ethereum the bitcoin being added to the network and how ren can bridge you know each of those chains i want to mention kind of a joke that i saw but it was actually kind

of turned into something serious much like the um the circulating supply of ethereum you know that kind of started as a joke and then it kind of turned into something that people were concerned about i have kind of a similar story so i saw what it was supposed to be a joke tweet it said something like all of this bitcoin is now being put to use on the ethereum blockchain so what happens when all of bitcoin is now collateralized on these other chains if you take that to an extreme and you know for lots of reasons not all of the bitcoin is gonna you know be on these other chains but it brings up an important point of scaling and as more bitcoin is collateralized you know how does that affect the

bitcoin network does it make it less secure you know are miners less efficient um and then how is it going to affect the ethereum network and as well as your protocol you know how do you see the scaling you know playing out yeah no for sure those are good questions um man i think with bitcoin um not not a huge expert on on other as as as others are on bitcoin i would say you know at the end of the day when bitcoin is on another chain it's still on the bitcoin network you know it's just not an address that's kind of locked up um and so um it's not like it kind of disappears from the from the u2xo set you know there's still a utxo on bitcoin that is still there it's just in custody of red vm right

i think it's great for bitcoin even though maxies don't do i agree so i think in this case ethereum is kind of like a layer two for bitcoin so it does you know it does uh decrease the amount of transaction throughput in theory on on the native bitcoin chain so i think in my naive bitcoin brain i would see that maybe possibly is a good thing i think also you know bitcoin has seen a narrative shift from pdp internet cash to buy a coffee to uh digital gold bars that you're gonna run the entire world off of which is great i think basic credit markets basic peer-to-peer internet credit markets are how you 10x the utility of bitcoin as a global collateral and ethereum is

literally finding product market fit over the last eight to 10 months based on this exact use case and so putting bitcoin on ethereum there i think it it vastly grows the application space for bitcoin as a collateral uh as a worldwide collateral uh that's permissions i think on the ethereum side i think it's good for ethereum i think it's necessary it probably takes a little bit of attention away from eth the asset uh i don't think the i think i think bitcoin ethereum kind of violates the narrative for you know kind of the efa's money uh philosophy because it's you know it's a it's a provable fixed supply so it's naturally a better collateral than the fuzziness of each supply its current supply so uh so yeah so i think for interoperabi

for other further layer ones that are smart contract capable i'm i'm kind of our resident bull on a lot of these other kind of smart contract platforms because i think with those if they're if polka dot was on its own you know i think it would have a tough job but i think polkadot with with run vm is actually i think we actually i mean i'm biased but i think we actually enable their success in a lot of ways because now we can bridge over assets that our people already use and so i think ethereum needs to figure out how to scale and neither needs to figure out the scale pretty quickly because in a space that moves so fast i could see a year from now you know other smart contract platforms not stealing the show from ethereum but being competitive and i think at the end of the day

capital will find yields and they don't care if they have to download a new wall to do so yeah so i think i have one more technical question and it's funny kind of how the ethereum killer narrative is coming back because they're just taking so long with these 2.0 and their gas fees so it'll be interesting to see if they lose that first mover effect by taking so long with their you know 2.0 launch the last technical question i had was kind of how renbtc as a bridge between these different chains differs from some more of the l1 interoperability functions that we had seen being developed like atomic swaps and you know some of these other inter-block chain functions

how does renbtc you know adapt some of that original technology and then add you know your own flavor and your own spin on it yeah for sure um our our kind of decentralized custodian nature is what really shines here because it's a very simple model give your assets to this custodian and this custodian will make you a one-to-one representation and that allows run vm to be really really flexible because our newly invented way of doing sbc you know we're basically just at the end of the day when you get down to the most base layer we're just a wallet we're just a wallet and we allow you to park funds there as we as as and i'm kind of i'm taking the liberties i'm sure along with would definitely disagree on how i would frame that but at a high level that's that's what we do

there other approaches are are just much more bespoke so for atomic swaps you're always going to be limited by the capabilities of the network that you're operating with so like for instance the way in which bitcoin scripts do you know uh atomic swaps like for instance at atomic swap you have a free 48 atomic spots are are done using a kind of a time lock contract and how that works is that essentially you know one of one of those parties can back out uh at a uh at a particular time also with atomic swaps so during a period uh users can kind of have a free option to actually flake out on the actual

transaction except for for htlc swaps for other um atomic swaps you also you know they're very expensive on chain as well and so for us you know our model is like you just need to send funds to this address and then this secondary network will verify that in a decentralized way it's much more flexible option and so if you're developing atomic swaps for each connection to each network you're going to naturally run into more limitations than than you would with vm now run vm is dependent on other capabilities of of the other networks but not to the extent that other methods that use atomic swaths would be yeah the atomic swaps kind of came from i think from eric voorhees at a

at shape shift i believe way back in the day we actually had them come to our uh our club in university on like a zoom meeting or something and he talked to us and that kind of it kind of reminds me of uh of ren vm but obviously you know a tad different as you explained to kind of piggy back off that idea of more decentralized in the vm state what's the governance like at ren right so do the token holders are are they eligible to play around with any of the governance is it only those who run the dark nodes is there governance what is the governance structure like at ren and is there any further plans to further decentralize yeah of course of course um yeah so currently kind of in our bootstrapping phase i mean the team basically has control of the protocol and kind of what

what um proposals move forward and all that good stuff and it's just a matter of us being early and and this is more of a prudence approach more than anything it's like you know if something goes wrong we can act quickly right as soon as you turn it over to you know a host of individuals across the world things move very slow as a result right you need to get get you know cooperation and agreement on all proposals and that takes time um so so in the early stages you know we're we're kind of overseeing the governance aspect but kind of as we speak in fact we're designing um the governance framework to essentially decentralize the decision-making and how proposals move forward within the protocol so we'll soon be releasing the rent

forum and which people you know it's very similar to the maker dev forum and you know kind of other other similar um rfp uh proposal systems basically so you know someone will have a proposal there'll be a discussion and it'll be voted on and then you know it'll move forward based on based on the number of votes you know we're going to keep it kind of simple at first and then as as time goes on it'll become more advanced and sophisticated but yeah so i mean there's a lot kind of being settled and worked out as as we speak but essentially dark nodes will indeed have some some governance capacity if they choose to um and that really will be the main you know the dark note holders and those who hold ren will will indeed have the ability to participate in governance

um so now we're definitely looking forward to it um it's just a matter of prudence and kind of moving moving slow because you know once you start a governance system you can't take it back right it is let out in the wild and you know if something is done incorrectly then there's really no way to recover it right so so we're taking our time there you know and governance is a you know tricky tricky subject i mean we you know nation states are still trying to find you know the most efficient way to govern a population right so it is by no means solved um you know and we're seeing you know a variety of proposals out in out in the crypto world right now you know some being successful some some not you know some are aren't being successful so we're kind of sitting on the sidelines

seeing what makes sense and then and then we'll move forward in due time um yeah but that's that's where we are there definitely there should be some news about that aspect of uh of the protocol this fall as well so we're definitely looking forward to it beautiful yeah there's no real rush as you said once it's out there it's out there and there's no you know you can change it but then once you start to to change it then you get into the realm of the ethereum and the etc hard forks and the community splits and all sorts of other issues that can arise you know with the governance and the voting and all that kind of stuff and yeah so we are almost out of time here so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have a rapid fire round for either of you guys uh or we can do

both and basically we'll ask you a few questions and then they'll be short and if you want to answer in a sentence or two max if you don't want to answer you can pass and yeah so who wants to go first sounds good i'll take the lead all right all right beautiful so first question will dogecoin ever be on ethereum yes we're bringing it to ethereum dot or atom ecosystem and why uh tough call i i'd say dot um because that's what we're working with right now so we're looking forward to it yeah i'd say dot that's where all the cool kids in berlin are yeah nfts and gaming is this the next big

thing in 2020 and if not what is no i i don't think so i think it'll take take another year or two in my opinion yeah not not in 2020 uh man i don't know uh i think i think interoperability would be the big thing in the top ten on coin market cap by the end of the year we will pass on that particular question okay okay and then uh last one if you had to pitch a celebrity on ren who would it be and what would you say uh elon musk you know big fans of course uh and really i mean we're a universal nexus point for value transfer you know and i think that's a huge huge uh benefit for the further world in

fact i mean we make you know moving assets um regardless of of type uh far more efficient and i think that that'll have a really profound impact on society i'd pitch kanye [Laughter] so that that's actually not so far-fetched even though kanye is far-fetched in whatever you know in whatever domain he's in but i i mean he's in wyoming where they just elected a senator who's like that's right yeah so i mean

there's i don't know if you want to call it a conspiracy i don't know what you want to call it but why kanye's in wyoming of all places has got me thinking they got like no taxes there the taxes there are absurd there's like nothing man yeah well they're really funny too so that kanye's gonna make that pitch happen yeah yeah he's ahead of the curve man no i don't know all right he's yeah he's primed he's primed for for rent that's right the day that i see kanye with a ren shill on twitter is the day that i sell everything i think so man all right guys well hey it was an absolute pleasure um and i know our audience is going to get a lot from this we do appreciate your time as well you guys crushed it um yeah man

thanks thanks for having us guys and uh yeah we'll do it again soon yeah oh thanks for having us great chat any last words from you guys no uh check us out you know obviously if you have any questions we're happy to answer them on our telegram chat our twitter is at rent protocol um yeah so so come and join us and uh yeah we'd love to have you thanks all yeah if you're sure uh bridge.run project.if you want to do bitcoin ethereum and if you're skeptical rap bitcoin.cafe or wptz.cafe beautiful thanks for listening to the d5i design podcast until next time defy slate team you