Ren Just Had a Great Week as Demand for Bitcoin on DeFi Rises

Prices for ren, the token for the RenVM DeFi network, surged by more than 100% over the past week. That’s because the total amount of renBTC, a tokenized bitcoin that is locked in RenVM, broke 10,000 on Monday, according to data collected by DeFi Pulse.

• The total value locked in RenVM jumped to more than $174 million on Monday from approximately $59.9 million a week earlier.
• There is a growing demand for having bitcoin (BTC) on the Ethereum blockchain as it is increasingly used in decentralized finance (DeFI).
• As reported by CoinDesk previously, RenVM holds a cryptocurrency and mints a representation of that crypto as an ERC-20 token (renBTC, for instance) for use on Ethereum.
• Data from Dune Analytics shows more than 40,000 bitcoin have been tokenized on Ethereum. About 21.7% of that amount was minted by renBTC, making it second behind wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) in the market.
• The recent popularity of tokenized bitcoin indicates a rising demand to use bitcoin in the white-hot Ethereum-based DeFi applications.
• “Bitcoin is now an undeniable part of DeFi, with $420 million of BTC on Ethereum in one form or another,” Loong Wang, chief technical officer of Ren, tweeted on Aug. 15.