The RenVM will bridge Bitcoin and other assets to Polygon

The integration means people can now use their Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, and Dogecoin with Dapps on Polygon

Ren announced on its blog yesterday that it was launching the first direct bridge to RenVM (Ren virtual machine), which will connect users with the Polygon network.

Initially known as Republic, Ren aims to make decentralised finance (DeFi) more accessible through interoperability and providing liquidity between different blockchain platforms.

Since 2020, RenVM has allowed users to bring assets such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Zcash to decentralised applications (Dapps) on Ethereum. Now, users will also be able to deposit and withdraw native Ren assets directly to Polygon.

With the launch of the new RenBridge, users can mint and burn Bitcoin, Zcash, Bitcoin Cash, and Dogecoin on Polygon in the form of renBTC, renZEC, renBCH and renDOGE respectively. Support for DigiByte, Filecoin, and Terra will be added soon after.

Ren-based assets will soon be available for use on all Dapps in the Polygon ecosystem, starting with QuickSwap, BadgerDAO, Curve Finance, and Varen Finance. Developers can also use the RenJS software development kit (SDK) to build cross-chain Dapps on Polygon.

Polygon Co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, commented, “The Ren Protocol has been a leader in bridging the gap between Bitcoin and DeFi, and we’re thrilled to have Polygon chosen as the first direct bridge integration for RenVM. We look forward to supporting and helping DeFi on Polygon grow, and bring greater access to Polygon’s DeFi ecosystem through the RenVM bridge.”

Bridging to Polygon provides DeFi users with benefits such as faster transactions and lower fees when compared with Ethereum. In fact, Polygon can handle up to 65,000 transactions per second on a single side chain, with a block confirmation time of under two seconds. For this reason many Ethereum Dapps have integrated with Polygon recently.

Earlier this week, Polygon announced the launch of its own Polygon SDK, with the aim of transforming Ethereum into a fully-fledged multi-chain ecosystem, and thereby establishing Polygon as the leading scaling and infrastructure platform for Ethereum.

With all these developments and milestones for Polygon, it is perhaps not surprising that the network’s native cryptocurrency, MATIC, has been leading the crypto market recovery following last week’s dip. At time of writing, MATIC is trading at $1.85, representing an increase of 73% since the start of this week and year-to-date gains of 10,350%.