As digital asset markets suffer a broad pullback, cross-chain bridge protocol Ren has announced integrations with EMV-compatible chains Fantom and Polygon that could bolster liquidity across the DeFi ecosystem.
In a blog post on Friday, Ren announced that the RenVM bridge now supports the trustless transfer of four popular cryptocurrencies to Fantom, including Bitcoin (BTC), DOGE (DOGE), and ZCash (ZEC). Three additional Fantom bridge assets are coming in as well, including Filecoin and LUNA. Likewise, in a post on Wednesday, Ren announced a similar seven-asset integration with Polygon:
The Fantom announcement also noted that Ren is “currently working on adding Ren-based assets to Curve, QuickSwap, BadgerDAO, and beyond.” While Ren serves as a bridge between chains, a recent collaboration with BadgerDAO on Ethereum demonstrated that a partnership with a DeFi protocol can drive protocol fees and volume for all parties. In Badger’s case, one-click bridge-and-deposit functionality has driven Badger’s WBTC vault to a quarter billion in TVL.
Per BadgerDAO’s founder Chris Spadafora, $150 million in BTC has already passed through the joint protocol bridge.
Sidechains like Fantom and Polygon have become increasingly in-demand in recent months as developers, investors and farmers look for ways to escape Ethereum’s high gas fees. Prior to the recent market slump, EMV-compatible chains played host to implementations of major Ethereum-native DeFi protocols, while side-chain tokens like MATIC have proven to be among the most resilient to the recent bearish price action.
A popular Fantom community account hailed the trustless bridge as the “holy grail” for the chain, noting that the bridge has the potential to significantly bolster total value locked (TVL) metrics for Fantom’s various DeFi protocols, including SushiSwap, Curve and C.R.E.A.M.
“The addition of Fantom will greatly benefit each protocol by bringing more utility to Fantom and even more velocity through RenVM,” said Ren's chief operating officer Michael Burgess in a blog post. “We could not be more excited for this to go live, as it’ll help bolster utility for the entire DeFi ecosystem.”