Curve Finance Integrates RenVM for Bitcoin Liquidity Pools

Curve – a sector-rising liquidity aggregator – has just unveiled support for Ren and their newly launch RenVM.

Curve Finance Integrates RenVM

1? Earn yield with your BTC

2? Seamless BTC to WBTC on-ramp

3? Build new financial products with the renBTC <> WBTC liquidity pool@CurveFinance @WrappedBTC #RenVM #DeFi $BTC $renBTC $WBTChttps://t.co/F4U02piZX0

— Ren (@renprotocol) June 11, 2020

For those unfamiliar with Curve Finance, the project has solidified itself as a stablecoin yield aggregator, effectively creating a trading venue to swap between tokens like DAI, USDC, sUSD, TUSDT and USDT with minimal slippage. On top of this, Curve’s token wrapper – yTokens – grant those who provide liquidity to the platform with attractive returns by stacking favorable lending returns across the wider DeFi ecosystem.

Now, in partner with RenVM, Curve is expanding beyond just stablecoins to offer an Ethereum-native Bitcoin liquidity pool. With RenVM, users can seamlessly convert their Bitcoin to an Ethereum-wrapped renBTC. With this new integration, those who convert BTC through the RenVM now have a liquid trading pair to access WBTC – the leading Bitcoin wrapper currently supported by virtually all DeFi protocols including industry leaders like Maker as collateral to mint Dai.

What’s to Know?

As it stands today, those looking to mint WBTC need to do so through a trusted custodian like CoinList. While this has been very effective for whales porting Bitcoin to Etheruem in a trusted fashion, it currently lacks anonymity and is somewhat time-intensive when jumping between different platforms.

Now, using the Curve renBTC pool, users can deposit Bitcoin which is automatically wrapped as renBTC. While the option to convert to WBTC from there is optional, the blog post suggests that other DeFi applications can make this conversion happen automatically – effectively allowing someone to “deposit Bitcoin to Aave or Compound” and receive an interest-earning asset (aWBTC or cWBTC) in return. Here’s a glimpse at what this looks like on the Curve interface.

This premise of abstracting on-ramps is extremely powerful, and without liquidity aggregators like Curve, this flow would suffer from steep slippage that makes the conversion ineffective. With this, it’s fascinating to think about creating intuitive, permissionless tooling to access DeFi’s top protocols in a matter of clicks – all without ever leaving the application.

Curve Expands Its Horizon

For those who have been keeping up with Curve, you may recall their recent announcement of a native governance token earned from the usage of the protocol. Akin to Balancer Liquidity Mining or Compound’s COMP model, those who provide (or have provided) liquidity on Curve are set to receive governance tokens in the coming months.

Time for a quick announcement.

Curve is working on decentralizing its ownership through a Curve governance token. All liquidity providers since the inception in January 2020 will be considered for the initial distribution proportionally.

Details on supply/demand to follow soon!

— Curve (@CurveFinance) May 30, 2020

This introduction highlights another introducing trend within DeFi where users are not only gaining the immediate benefits of yield hacking – but also governance tokens which influence protocol decisions and are likely to have future economic value.

The reason this is relevant to this story is that the recent integration of BTC signals that Curve is likely to expand it’s asset aggregation even more, possibly tackling assets like ETH wrappers (think sETH, mETH, etc.) and other ERC20 tokens. Now, with the introduction of community governance, those decisions will happen in a distributed fashion – rather than unilaterally by the Curve team.

Rounding out this story, the premise of DeFi team’s partnering to offer even further composability never ceases to amaze me. While some may have brushed this integration off, the theory of creating Bitcoin DeFi onramps is extremely powerful, to say the least.

In the meantime, we recommend staying up with Ren and Curve on Twitter!

Cooper Turley

Cooper is the Editor of DeFi Rate. He is an ambassador of Set Protocol and an active contributor to MetaCartel where he seeks to find emerging consumer-facing applications that propel the Ethereum ecosystem. He often works with projects as the Director of Fitzner Blockchain Consulting where he coauthors the weekly publication Token Tuesdays.

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