Ren launches bridge to Polygon for seven top crypto assets

The launch of the new Polygon x RenVM Bridge was announced on Twitter by Polygon on Thursday, which emphasized the bridge will allow Bitcoin (BTC) and other assets to be used on the high-speed and low-cost layer-two network.

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

Ren’s ERC-20 representations of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Dogecoin (DOGE), Filecoin (FIL), Terra (LUNA), Zcash (ZEC) and DigiByte (DGB) can now be used on the Polygon network. The assets can be traded and pooled on Polygon-based decentralized exchange QuickSwap, with the Ren 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 DeFiLlama, the RenVM is currently the 30th-largest decentralized finance protocol with a total value locked of $573 million.

Polygon has recently emerged as the leading layer-two scaling solution by TVL and the second-largest decentralized finance protocol overall with roughly $10.3 billion worth of assets currently held on the network. On Tuesday, 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 Friday, and Optimism aiming to go live in July.