Ren launches bridge to Polygon for seven top crypto assets

The launch of the new Polygon x RenVM Bridge was announced to Twitter by Polygon on May 28, who emphasized the bridge will allow Bitcoin and other assets to be used on the high-speed and low-cost layer-two.

Ren and Polygon have teamed up to launch a bridge allowing BTC and other assets to be transferred between Bitcoin and the Ethereum scaling solution.

Excited to announce the launch of a direct bridge to Polygon by @renprotocol!

With the Polygon x RenVM Bridge, users can move #BTC and many more assets directly to Polygon, enabling high-speed, low-cost txns for these assets.

Start bridging now: https://t.co/91xPP2E2cp pic.twitter.com/E9AkveROGR

— Polygon (previously Matic) (@0xPolygon) May 27, 2021

Ren’s ERC-20 representations of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Filecoin, Terra, Zcash, and DigiByte can now be used on the Polygon network. The assets can already be traded and pooled on top Polygon-based DEX, QuickSwap, with the team also hinting at future yield opportunities for the tokens on Polygon deployments of Curve Finance and BadgerDAO.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, a Ren representative indicated the team plans to launch more bridges to high-speed scalable networks in the near future.

Since launching the RenVM one year ago, Ren has emerged as a leading portal allowing wrapped versions of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, and other layer-one assets to be traded on the Ethereum mainnet. Roughly $246.3 million worth of assets were bridged using RenVM over the past seven days.

According to DeFi Llama, the RenVM is currently the 30th-largest decentralized finance protocol with a total value locked, or TVL, of $573 million.

Polygon has recently emerged as the leading layer-two scaling solution by TVL and the second-largest DeFi protocol overall with roughly $10.3 billion worth of assets currently held on the network. On May 25, it was announced that famed billionaire investor Mark Cuban had invested in Polygon.

However, competition among layer-twos is heating up, with Arbitrum targeting its mainnet launch for May 28, and Optimism aiming to go live in July.