Coin Spotlight: Ren

Building a fair and private means of exchange for the financial tools and digital assets of the future.

An Ecosystem of Unstoppable Privacy

The vision for Ren is to enable a world of privacy-preserving applications where Ren powers a new kind of trustless distributed computation — one where all applications are run in secret to protect the privacy of all users and data. Ren empowers developers to build decentralized and trustless financial applications, all run in complete secrecy.

Ren is a complete privacy stack built for the digital era of finance and is designed to suit the privacy needs of any financial application, both centralized or decentralized. The stack will consist of three core components:

Zero-Knowledge Transaction Layer will make it possible to store and transfer tokens from any blockchain without exposing wallet balances or transaction amounts.

Interoperability Layer extends zero-knowledge transactions and makes it possible to execute trustless swaps between blockchains in secret and to bridge tokens from one blockchain to another.

Dark Pool Layer will provide secret order matching engines. The orders will be known only to their owners without exposing the price and volume to the public, including the exchange itself.

RenVM

RenVM is a virtual machine for performing any decentralized computation in complete privacy using a combination of secure multiparty computations and zkSNARK’s. This is the technology that will underpin the entire Ren stack. It can execute general purpose programs, using inputs from various users, without revealing the information to the users or the Darknodes powering the virtual machine.

RenVM is developed to replace third-parties, providing equivalent functionality, but instead, using a decentralized network of Darknodes instead of a centralized, trusted entity. For dark pools and its supporting tools and applications, RenVM allows the team to build an order matching engine that is faster and more flexible and a settlement layer that preserves privacy and is interoperable between blockchains with the locking of funds, typically occurring in atomic swaps.

What is RenEx?

RenEx is the first application built on Ren and it’s a decentralized, open-source dark pool that allows traders to place orders privately and securely. It uses multi-party computation (sMPC) to match orders without exposing the price or the volume of the orders. Any exchange can build dark pools on Ren to support large volume trades with minimal price slippage and market impact while guaranteeing the rules of the dark pool are not broken.

The Team at Ren is determined to bridge the gap between traditional finance and digital assets. Building a base layer for the first provably fair dark pools is a necessary component to achieve this, with the ultimate goal of not only making a superior product but moving the entire ecosystem forward.

What is a Dark Pool?

Dark pools are private exchanges where institutional investors can anonymously trade large block orders of shares that are not accessible to the public. They are great avenues for institutional money managers to facilitate large orders at reasonable prices without impacting the market.

The primary and often criticized advantage of dark pools is that institutional investors making large transactions can do so without full transparency while finding buyers and sellers. This prevents heavy price devaluation which would otherwise occur.

For example, if it were public knowledge, that an investment firm was trying to sell $500,000 worth of a cryptocurrency, the token would almost certainly have decreased in value by the time they found buyers for all of their tokens. Devaluation has become an increasingly likely risk, and open order books on cryptocurrency exchanges are causing prices to respond much more quickly to market pressures. If the transaction is reported only after the trade has been executed, the news has much less of an impact on the market.

How RenVM Works

Ren order system summary. Image Source: Binance Research

Once two orders are matched, RenVM aids the exchange of the assets using an atomic swap initiated over the P2P Republic Swarm Network. The two participating parties do not have to be connected to the network to be matched and the orders will remain secure until this occurs. However, upon matching, necessary information about the order will be revealed to both parties and total liquidity within the network cannot be reliably estimated by anyone.

REN, an ERC20 utility token, is the native token on the platform and is utilized to participate in the Darknode network (via REN bond). Darknodes are currently paid in ETH but will receive a more stable type of payment in the future.

Coinplan is very excited to feature Ren because many traditional assets are becoming increasingly tokenized and a platform to facilitate their fair exchange is essential. You can view REN inside Coinplan’s Alliance Portfolio here.

To learn more about Ren, please take a look at these helpful links:

Ren Website

Ren News

Twitter

GitHub