coindesk.com
REN, the native token of the Ren protocol, has climbed 18% over the past 24-hours.
The surge comes amid rising interest in multichain projects. It also seems to reflect rising interest in the protocol, which allows users to move digital assets from one blockchain to another, generating cross-chain liquidity.
“The multichain narrative is catching investor excitement,” said Charles Storry, head of growth at Phuture. “Ren, with its legacy and exchange availability, has witnessed the upside of this.”
REN has increased nearly 50% over the last two weeks, according to data from CoinGecko. Storry said he anticipates seeing more ‘legacy’ projects like this gain momentum in the short term. Stacks (STX), the open-source platform that enables smart contracts and apps for bitcoin, touted as a competitor of Ren, surged 15% on Wednesday.
In November Ren, which was Alameda-funded, announced that it would shift from Ren 1.0 to a more efficient, secure Ren 2.0 version several weeks earlier than expected. It also said that minting through Ren 1.0 had been disabled and that Ren 2.0 would be deployed via testnet.
To cover funding needs in the aftermath, the Ren Foundation passed a vote to mint 200 million tokens to fund its transition and growth to Ren 2.0.
The new iteration will also offer ‘RenEVM’ “an Ethereum-based plugin for Darknode that allows arbitrary programs to be deployed on top of the Ren blockchain,” according to the company’s blog post. “This will mean that Ren will not only support minting and releasing assets between blockchains but also smart contracts that can power any kind of application, cross-chain specialized or not.”
After its loss of funding in November, Twitter rumors circulated that the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, Binance, would acquire the protocol. Last week, the rumors resurfaced on a number of Chinese Twitter accounts, possibly contributing to the token’s price uptick. The token also pumped around 26% at the end of November when rumors initially arose.
Binance did not respond to a CoinDesk request for comment.
The majority of trading volume for REN is on centralized exchanges with Binance holding the majority of tokens and Coinbase following.
According to data from research group Sanitment, Ren holders/addresses holding 10,000-1 million tokens are holding their highest amount in three months. These Ren holders have collectively upped their total by 4.73% in the last 24 hours.