Alameda Research Joins Up With Interoperability Project Ren

Ren – the team behind the interoperability blockchain project RenVM – has joined Alameda Research, according to a blog post published Feb. 2. It’s not immediately clear what the terms of the “joining” are.

Formerly known as Republic Protocol, Ren acts as a bridge between various blockchain assets through a custodial node solution. Its tokenized bitcoin product, RenBTC, is the second-leading BTC asset in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem with a market cap over $500 million, according to CoinGecko.

In the blog post, Ren CEO Taiyang Zhang said Ren has begun working on support for the Solana blockchain with the intent of porting Ethereum-based ERC-20 assets and ether to that blockchain. Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of both Alameda Research and trading platform FTX, has been an early force in Solana blockchain development.

“The Ren development team will be prioritising support for Solana in our Multichain libraries, and in RenVM itself,” the blog states. “This support is currently under audit, and we anticipate that we will be able to begin bridging assets to/from Solana in Q2. Doing so will have a profound impact on Serum, but also on the wider Solana ecosystem.”

This is not the first DeFi project to join the Alameda and FTX team. Uniswap competitor SushiSwap also partially came under the organization’s umbrella after keys controlling the project were transferred to Bankman-Fried in September 2020.

Bankman-Fried did not immediately return a request for comment.