In this edition of DeFi Dive, Michael W. Burgess, Ren’s Head of Operations, discusses their team’s journey of bringing interoperability to DeFi.

How did you get your start in crypto and what inspired you to build your project, product, or service?

I got into crypto early 2017 and one of the most obvious issues at that time was the lack of decentralized interoperability.

To this day there are lots of solutions out there to trade BTC for ETH/ERC20s/etc but none that embodied the whole point of crypto: trustlessness, permissionless, decentralization, and privacy.

With RenVM, smart contracts on any blockchain can control tokens on other blockchains, allowing DeFi to leverage the liquidity available anywhere and everywhere. It does all this without compromising trustlessness, permissionless, decentralization, or privacy.

What are you building and what sets it apart?

In the simplest terms, RenVM brings interoperability to DeFi.

The advantage over other solutions is its generic interoperability; meaning it works with any blockchain, not just a one-off solution. We already support BTC, BCH, and ZEC; with many more to come.

You can think of RenVM as a Tesla with over-the-air updates. Anytime we upgrade, add a feature, or new blockchain; applications that utilize RenVM will receive these benefits without lifting a finger.

Further, RenVM is composable. Meaning it serves as a plug-in for decentralized finance and therefore, any DeFi application can easily incorporate RenVM’s capabilities into their applications and existing smart contracts.

Who do you view as the ideal user or customer for your product or service?

DeFi Applications such as DEXes, Lending, Leveraging, etc

What future event or feature on your roadmap are you most excited for?

RenVM Mainnet is right around the corner, so we are working hard to bring it to fruition.

Where do you see your project, product, or service fitting into the future of DeFi?

With RenVM, a new narrative for the blockchain ecosystem rises. DeFi is no longer constrained, and a world of trustless value transfer exchange (regardless of blockchain) is born.

Bringing any digital assets to DeFi (Ethereum) regardless of blockchain, will have a profound impact on its dominance and ultimately solidify its role as the world’s settlement layer. International commerce is built on trust and given the world’s current fragmentation and lack thereof, it is one of the most important trust layer projects in existence today.

RenVM will help usher in this new paradigm.

What’s something in DeFi that you think more people should be paying attention to?

The potential of composability is really quite exciting.

What DeFi will be able to achieve in a year’s time will dwarf the products traditional finance can offer. This is a really important step in an industry’s maturation.

How can readers learn more about your product/service?

Come find us on Twitter and get excited because 2020 will be an exciting time.