Add $UNI/$renBTC and $renBTC/ETH to list of pools eligible for rewards

Proposal Discussion
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Seen as renBTC would be the decentralized version of wBTC I think it would be a good idea to allow renBTC to be a part of the UNI farming pools. Also, there should be a trade between BTC and UNI tokens as well.

PS: I do not hold renBTC and actually hold wBTC myself however I do still firmly believe that this should be a part of the uni ecosystem.

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There are several issues with renBTC. There is a risk behind the way they lock up invested bitcoin.
Not sure if this is good for exchanges/swaps:

  • The developers are not showing the full source of the running contracts/modules
  • The system stores locked BTC in a single address
  • The known implementation doesnt follow the own whitepaper

Details:
On Medium you can find the article named “how-safe-are-todays-wrapped-btc-bridges”

"…they emphasize that the management of cross-chain BTC accounts is done by a group of “dark nodes” using MPC and TSS (specifically, Shamir’s Secret Sharing), and the members of this group of “dark nodes” are periodically regrouped.

Paradoxically, we found that the Bitcoin address provided by renBTC that users transfer their real BTC to for locking has not changed since the first day it went online."

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Thanks for the information, I did not know that. But wouldn’t wrapped BTC have the same issue? Seen as it’s a centralized entity who holds bitcoin for you basically.

Anyway I find it illogical to have one and not the other. Therefore I think if uniswap is to keep the wBTC - ETH pair, then it should implement renBTC too. Again, I should state that I personally hold wBTC and not renBTC. Just thinking of more options to bring more liquidity to the UNI liquidity program.

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Both of those things are changing in the next phases of their mainnet. If you Google “Road to decentralization Ren” you’ll find their article on this (can’t post links).

Most of the code is open-sourced and everything will be open-sourced, and the validator set holding the private keys will expand and sharding will be enabled where liquidity is distributed in multiple wallets, rotating to new ones every 24h.

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Even though I would welcome another BTC option on Ethereum other than WBTC, and RenVM seems like an exciting project, at this point in time its mainnet is only 4 months old. I’m afraid the technology might not be mature enough, at the very least it is quite hard to estimate what the risks are.

If we take a look at the adoption of RenBTC among centralized exchanges, it’s only listed on 1 currently. So maybe they’re not sure yet either. I think at least it needs some time and some expertise to be put into it before we can offer it as an “advertised” option…

When it comes to centralized solutions for pegged coins for USD, up until now they have been keeping the peg better than their decentralized alternatives. Custody is not a new piece of technology, and custodial risks seem to be better understood overall.

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Humm, I’d rather wait until tBTC arrives.
As far as I understand, It’s backed by BTCs and ETHs stored on much more than one adress

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A totally fair assessment! In the meantime the Ren team are pushing ahead delivering more integrations with other chains and making it more secure, and decentralizing the network further. More chain support also means more assets can be listed on Uniswap (Polkadot assets, Binance Smart chain assets, Cosmos assets, Filecoin, Dogecoin etc.).

RenVM has been live for 5 months now and has not had a single hack or user losing funds, and is progressively getting more decentralized. The point of the centralization has been to make sure that nothing bad would happen if something broke in the system, which has not happened. And as the system continually proves to be secure and robust, the number of active validators in the system will expand and the network will take on a sharded structure where not only are the backing assets custodied by different validator groups, but also the validator groups will be churned daily forming new groups controlling new addresses that custody the assets.

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Definitely against this, Chris Blec did a great job highlighting how centralized renBTC is right now: https://twitter.com/ChrisBlec/status/1302998918020714497

Decrypt did a write up about it: https://decrypt.co/40110/massive-honeypot-ren-holds-100m-bitcoin-centralized-wallet

Until it becomes more decentralized it’s a BIG NO from me :warning:

What would be better than renBTC & wBTC would be tBTC providing there’s no issues with the latest deployment although maybe bit premature for that discussion and better when it’s been active for a few months with no issues

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