The latest attempt to bring Bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain goes live

The latest implementation of Bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain appears to have gone live recently. According to Etherscan, there are 1.24 renBTC live on the Ethereum mainnet at the moment. A CoinDesk report claims that its part of the Ren smart contract, which has seemingly gone live ahead of its launch.

Kain Warwick of Synthetix recently tweeted that he was the first person to hold a Bitcoin in renBTC. However, Taiyang Zhang, the CEO of the company behind the project, told CoinDesk: 

While the smart contracts have been deployed on Ethereum, RenVM itself is not actually on mainnet. This is because RenVM is a distinct network separate to Ethereum. The final mainnet subzero version of RenVM won’t be deployed until later. The minted renBTC so far has been from our own internal testing [and] Kain from Synthetix testing the system. The public hasn’t been able to mint renBTC thus far.

An excerpt from a Medium post by the renBTC’s CTO, Loong Wang, reads:

Any asset minted on Ethereum by RenVM is a 1:1 backed ERC-20. This means that if you have 1 renBTC (an ERC-20), you can always redeem it for 1 BTC. It's a direct supply peg. renBTC isn't a synthetic, it doesn't rely on a liquidation mechanism, and it's not the price of Bitcoin on Ethereum. It is a one to one representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum that can be redeemed for BTC at any time, in any amount.

The contracts for three new tokens are already published in Ren’s documentation. 1.12 renZEC and a negligible amount of renBCH have already been minted. Ren is an organization that grew out of the $30 million initial coin offering (ICO) for the Republic Protocol. It was initially envisioned as a way to run dark pools  privacy-preserving trading venues where the order book is kept secret. However, Wang recently explained his company’s turn away from dark pools. 

ETH had a lot of liquidity, but it was predominantly Bitcoin and USDT. So we would had to leverage things like atomic swaps, and they’re just too painful. And so we kind of turned around to say, well, we need to solve this interoperability problem before large liquidity is actually truly accessible in this space.