RFC-000-036: Ren 2.0

Requests For Comment | RFC
65

It’s pretty clear what community wants - it’s information. Regarding Greycore the valuable information would be how much progress was done in 2 years time with Greycore’s development, last we’ve heard Badger was undergoing onboarding on testnet. That was something like 8-9 months ago? What has been done since? We don’t have a slightest idea. How are we supposed to make an educated (!) discussion on this topic? Legit question (but a rhetorical one, because the answer is obvious).

Are you going to argue that federative decentralization as you call it is worse than what we’ve got now? You said that crypto community wouldn’t be fond of having 10 different entities controlling the multisig? I strongly disagree, that’s certainly better than one entity, which is what we have now.

And if you agree with the above, than we need to know the current state of things and how rational it would be to disregard all the work that was already done on Greycore.

We’ve also discussed that our Greycore partners could help out with marketing and their onboarding would be made known in the media. What about that?

You said that it can delay the actual decentralization, which was our former (?) end goal, how so? i.e. why do you say that?

It was known that Greycore was to be an intermediate solution before full decentralization and what we have now. And it was agreed unanimously that it’s the way to go. What changed? By the way will that decentralization still apply for Ren as a L1?

If there was some unforeseen difficulties or whatever and Greycore is far from ready, than I can certainly see how skipping it can be advantageous. But it is also something that we need to know (in order to have an educated discussion).

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66

all I can see is that the competition is not sleeping and you can already build your apps with them.
That means you have to be better and cheaper and have more options and functions that are only available by ren. So that people will build on ren instead of the projects that are already known.

67

I’d like to just reiterate this one statement - we need information about progress made so far. We can’t make informed decisions if we are kept in the dark (a brief 2 paragraph “update” in a blog post doesn’t convey much information after months of work).

I don’t know how we can make the decision to pile on more work without knowing the progress of the work that has been underway for months. And if it’s the case that Subnets influence Greycore & decentralization then just lay out the progress and ramifications if we decide to vote for or against it.

[Edit]
I remember mentions of “short term wins” from the treasury group when it came to using treasury funds for yield opportunities. Why can we not have a similar approach with the development progress? Get a win out (Greycore on mainnet) and then focus on Ren 2.0. If Subnets is the way to go as visioned by the dev team, I am pretty sure we’d vote in favor of it. But again, I don’t see how we can honestly vote for more work and further delays with the only response of “soon” if we don’t have actual progress conveyed clearly.

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68

Not sure why it matters what has been done when we are discussing potential new avenues. Let’s say greycore is ready to launch tomorrow, that would lock us in to that model for the foreseeable future which I do not believe is a good thing. I think we should be open to reconsider the model to aim for the fastest route to full decentralization, not some semi solution that might make changes in future even more difficult.

It might surprise you but I prefer centralized than federated model for sure. Try to contact any party of wBTC now and try to get some support, will not be easy. In a federated model most parties do not want to be held liable so they will avoid involvement at any cost. In a centralized model at least you have an entity to turn to.

Correct, multisig solution has been repeatedly criticized in crypto and rightfully so, it’s not a good solution. Every project should strive to move away from that, not towards it.

I don’t agree with the above, dropping Greycore can benefit us much more than implementing it, only my personal opinion ofc.

Marketing will be 100x more easy if we are fully decentralized.

Because we lock ourselves to a federated model which we cannot just change overnight, while we can aim for full decentralization immediately.

Like I mentioned in my initial post, I thought the idea was too contentious (seems I was right) so didn’t want to start discussions that would cause a bunch of fud and distraction. Now we are openly discussing the future of Ren so felt like a good time to finally open up .

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69

Let’s say greycore is launched tomorrow and all of CT call out how its not really decentralized? Then you AGAIN will turn to the team and complain about xyz and why this and why that…

Why not be proactive as a community and think this through? Together. I believe that would help the team much more as well as the project

70

why is work being continued on greycore then?

and why did you come up with the idea i think it would be nice to hear an opinion from the founders and the experts (jaz/susruth)

It is very surprising when you suddenly change everything where you have planned everything and invested a lot of time.
There should simply be a community call with jaz & susruth… or a detailed contribution what your opinion on greycore is and what the current status is.
?

71

To be VERY clear, this is just my personal opinion and has nothing to do with the team, I am posting this strictly as a community member out of own passion to drive Ren forward to success. Since I hold nodes and it will benefit me

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72

Great discussion, btw. And to be clear, I don’t doubt your sincerity, I believe you want the best for Ren. I’ve always listened closely to your viewpoints. I’m actually not even disagreeing with your thoughts on Greycore per se, and if this were a discussion in a vacuum on whether we should do Greycore or not, I might even agree with you. However…

There are many other factors here, including a 2-3 year history of building out Greycore (apparently). And Greycore being part of the larger roadmap, a key milestone on our Road to Decentralization. This is not a discussion in a vacuum, in other words!

Do you really want to make the case that a multi-sig composed of key stakeholders from across web3 (in theory respected projects like Curve and Badger) is inferior to our current situation of a multi-sig managed solely by Ren personnel (not just a multi-sig, but you get my point)?

There is also the credibility issue. The Ren team has promised Greycore for years, now they are going to walk away from it? This would call into question the development work to date, as well. Especially when key parts of our solution are not open sourced.

There is also 3rd party validation, something we would have if reputable projects are part of Greycore. I can’t imagine Curve, for example, would participate if the code wasn’t solid, if they didn’t have full access and understanding of what they are doing, and didn’t believe in the vision. I think this is especially important when our code is not fully open sourced. I would assume these projects would need to see the code before agreeing to be part of Greycore.

There is the marketing benefit of having reputable projects as part of Ren’s inner circle. It would help bring our community closer to their communities. It could open up unforeseen business opportunities as we strengthen our strategic relationship.

[Flashback: I remember having a discussion with Loong maybe 18 months ago on this very topic, saying we need to work closely with the new Greycore members to make a big marketing splash, and we should have the Greycore members themselves tweet out their involvement, not Ren, to maximize impact. He delegated that to Burgess to make sure it happened. I feel so naive now thinking about that discussion, but I digress.]

The concerns you have should have been raised 3 years ago, now it’s too late. We need to deliver on Greycore or the core team needs to lay out in detail why they cannot technically do it, or why it has been delayed for so long.

I would suggest we have a community call purely to review Greycore, its history, status, current members versus previously published members, everything that has happened to date, and then after the update we could ask questions. I’m especially interested to learn about the discussions we have had with Curve, Badger, etc., and how they view Greycore today.

If this all sounds too entitled, fair enough. Then the team should just say, explicitly, that they will not provide any substantive Greycore updates outside of monthly reports.

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73

A monthly community call as a discussion group could be productive. Of course we don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen, but a monthly cadence within a smaller working group of DNOs-Devs to discuss recent status updates and potential strategies may be more effective than Forum posts. (Maybe not a chaotic Twitter spaces, but more like an invite based 5-15 person Zoom call, with an agenda of topics, minutes/notes, etc. Back in the day, I saw some pretty productive subgroups/volunteer working groups form out of Yearn and other projects.)

At this stage, a sudden large RFC or blog post or proposal, might cause confusion within the community. It helps to get a roster of strong community supporters to add their names to proposals, compile supporting research analysis, etc. There can be separate working groups on specific topics, not just this one, but also marketing/partnerships, community communications, etc. And we can do this without a formal DAO

74

Thanks man, I appreciate your view as well and I sincerely believe we all want the same thing, the success of Ren. I have nothing against anyone, I do think its healthy with some spicy discussions. This his how we become resilient to external parties attacking us with fud.

I get that, I cant comment on that since I dont know. I do however think its beneficial for us as a community to brainstorm and consider other avenues, regardless of what information about greycore the team comes with.

I think I get your point, and yes I rather see it centralized and move over directly to full decentralization. What Im trying to say is that a semi-decentralized solution is not good at all for a protocol that acts as a custodian to possibly billions at stake. At least centralized and closed source means LESS attack vectors than semi-decentralized and out in the open.

In terms of pumpanomics I could agree with you, having a federated model with other big players in defi is great to pump REN, I just dont believe its sustainable and the vulnerabilities that come with is not worth the trade offs.

I get the feeling this is the key issue for many, they just want closure with past promises. I also believe this is somewhat of a red herring that will distract us from real success.

This is a valid point, I agree.

Yup agree and I am torn when suggesting moving past greycore. I do however believe that SO many projects that previously would not consider Ren will be drawn to Ren if its fully decentralized. So the trade off is worth it imo.

But thats the thing, WHY would it be too late now? What if moving past greycore would excel us to a much faster delivery of full decentralization?

What scares me the most is we get greycore just like the community is demanding and we get scrutinized so bad amongst our peers in crypto nobody will take us seriously anymore.

We already tried parroting “this is just one step in right direction” when Blec attacked us in the defi summer 2020 and I dont think that ended up very well. I would like to get out there with a solution that is bulletproof from the get go.

When/if we go ahead with greycore there needs to be a very detailed plan on how we are going to transition away from a federated model OR accept that we will never be fully decentralized as long as greycore exists. Im having a hard time seeing how that benefits us

+++

With all this said, and not just you Whiskey, how about we just entertain the thought and brainstorm a bit on how different models without greycore can look? I mean, does it hurt to play around with the thought? Maybe we even manage to inspire the team of unthought solutions that benefit us all. Maybe flushing out ideas convinces us even more that greycore is the right choice.

But if this topic bothers people I’m happy to step back and let the discussion go back to the subnet interrogation. My intention comes from a place to improve the situation, not make it worse.

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75

As I’ve said before, I’m open to anything that gets us to the goal of decentralization. I’ve only fixated on Greycore because that was one of the team’s key milestones to get us there. If there is a better way, I’m open minded and willing to listen.

Having said that, I would still like a detailed summary of what has happened to date with Greycore, even if we decide something else is preferable. In fact, a detailed summary of how we got to this point is exactly what we need to properly evaluate the way forward.

And I would really appreciate it if the core Ren team changed its current culture, which seems to value extreme secrecy over community and transparency. Greycore is just one of many issues in which info is practically non-existent. It really needs to change.

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76

The Greycore timeline is a relic of Ren 1.0 (the bridge); a milestone of the protocol having achieved enough stability to progressively decentralize. With the shift to Ren 2.0 (the L0/L1), the protocol is now anything but stable; it’s under intensive R&D. And there is nothing more insecure than decentralizing unstable software.

So, the questions I would ask are: if Ren 1.0 were secured by an expanded Greycore today, how would it affect the security of Ren 2.0? Would 2.0 need to be secured by the Greycore upon launch? If so, that would be a change in Labs’ historical approach towards progressive decentralization. Or could the two be bifurcated such that the Greycore could secure 1.0 while Labs progressively decentralizes 2.0 on a different schedule? Perhaps this would be an argument in favor of subnets.

Let’s be sure to keep a holistic view of the Greycore in our conversations and questions for Labs. In the meantime, let’s keep this RFC focused on 2.0.

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77

How decentralized can Ren 2.0 apps be, if the population of potential subnet node operators is limited to DNOs only?

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78

if you think about it, sabobi is probably right and we should think about whether greycore makes any sense at all.
the most important thing after security is that ren is completely decentralized when the L1 platform comes.
otherwise all this makes no sense for real applications.
I agree with him that we should at least find out something about greycore (max said a proposal will come soon, I’m very excited) and I’m waiting for it.
Just because greycore was always the plan doesn’t mean we have to stick with it when there are better solutions out there. The technical space moves so fast that you have to keep developing, because otherwise the projects will die out when it really starts with blockchain and use…
would still like to hear an answer from susruth once the suggestion is out because he was familiar with ren from the start…

79

A relic? We’re now supposed to believe Greycore is unnecessary, after years of promises? It’s almost Orwellian how the last two years of focus seem to be dismissed away as a quaint old “relic” of a bygone era, like fax paper, or vinyl records. Thank goodness we have actual team updates that paint a completely different picture on Greycore’s importance, otherwise I might start to doubt Greycore’s need myself!

Greycore is live on Testnet with our first member. This is a big milestone and has helped unveil several necessary improvements to our tooling and networking infrastructure before the next batch of members are onboarded in Q1, 2022. – Ren Development Update, Dec 31, 2021 (Year End Review and Looking Forward)

It was apparently a “big milestone” with more members expected in Q1…

How do you know that? Are you privy to team reports that we don’t have? How many developers are working on this, how does it compare to other initiatives? Who is leading this effort? If you have details on this intensive R&D effort, I’d love to learn more.

And no doubt Greycore was under “intensive R&D” for the past 2 years, as well, if Developer Updates were to be believed. What is the output of that intensive effort? :man_shrugging:

If I were a cynic I would start to think keeping our software unstable is a great way to avoid decentralization.

Great questions. Would love to have the info to evaluate.

I’m sorry, but everything that has happened to date is relevant in evaluating Ren 2.0. If years of intensive R&D effort around Greycore and H2H have resulted in very limited production ready output, and the team is unwilling to provide details as to why, I think that is highly relevant in evaluating how successful Ren 2.0 will likely be.

Otherwise, the cynic in me will think that in 2-3 years, after many monthly updates on how amazing Ren 2.0 is progressing (definitely “a blast”), we’ll learn - just before another scheduled release - it’s time to forget about the “relic” of Ren 2.0 to focus on Ren 3.0, and we’ll be back here once again, scratching our heads about what is really happening behind the scenes.

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80

Hi @DeFi_Whiskey I hear you and I think you have some valid points that would need to be addressed by the team hopefully sooner rather than later.

As another community member I would like to provide a balancing view, maybe a bit of history that may calm the cynic in you a bit :wink:

If we were to see the project as whole, we would clearly see three different stages:

  • First stage the project was oriented to create a darkpool. In this stage a lot of work was done to release a product which was delivered maybe not fully completed but we were in the process to make it grow. In this stage, the team saw the opportunity to escalate the project and provide better outcome for darknodes and community by transitioning Ren to be an interop protocol. This took us to stage number 2.

  • Stage 2 was very supported by the community as everyone saw the added value of being an interop protocol with a bigger scope and business opportunities . After years in development and work, we launched mainnet subzero again not fully complete (we are here now) but moving towards that. Now once again the team see an opportunity to escalate the project and provide better opportunities for DNOs and are proposing the subnet model to get there. This will take us to stage 3.

Stage 3. I believe once again the community see as overall positive transitioning ren to an L1/L0 but the needed open communication was just not there. This is something for the team to reflect. Moving from one stage to the next one requires strong communication, transparency and explanation and more so now that community have governance power. This is vital to support new paths.

Please note that with every change there were things that were abandoned but DNOs were overall better and I truly believe the team has the same goal to improve the project and provide further value to DNOs. I thank them for that forward thinking. What we need to focus now is on sorting the major feedbacks/concerns about subnet model in order to move forward to Ren 2.0. If I may, I will summarise them as I see them:

  1. Additional bond requirements from DN: overall negative response from community and not clear explanation why is required (in term of security or other)

  2. Ren tokenomics: Uncertainty what is the vision of the team (proponents of the model) about whether Ren token should or should not have inflation under this model and how would that work.

Another here is possibility of developers bypassing Ren functionalities and not paying fees to DNs?

  1. Uneven distribution of rewards: by capping the amount of validators in a subnet, there is a real risk some nodes will earn more than others which may create misalignment in governance and community goals (there are some interesting proposals from the community to reduce this already)

  2. Greycore/decentralisation: status and role of Greycore and decentralisation in Ren2.0

  3. Communication: lack of information at pretty much every level and a new roadmap are causing major trust issues. I hope this can improve drastically.

  4. Time required to deliver a L1/L0: in this point the major concern is that the development of the subnet model will delay deliverables like H2h and decentralisation and that the work of promoting new integrations under current model would not be done due to orienting all efforts and time to the new model.

I hope I captured the more important ones but anyone please add if you want

Cheers

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81

Well said, Maggie. And I do appreciate this context. I accept that my take has become more cynical over the past 12 months, and that’s not a good place to be. In my defense, it was the lack of information and borderline gaslighting on key issues that really drove me to the dark side… :slight_smile:

As I want to believe the best in people, I’ll step back a bit from posting in this RFC and just let the community figure this out. Besides, I’ve said what I wanted to say, no need to keep repeating myself.

And while I’ve doubted many things of late, I’ve always believed the Ren community to be one of the best in crypto, filled with people who want the best for the project, long term. And given the chance (and proper info!), I’m sure you’ll come to the right decisions.

Thanks again for your thoughtful response.

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82

You are community too @DeFi_Whiskey ! Please do not refrain from provide feedback in this RFC or any other. At the end of the day we all need to vote on these things eventually :stuck_out_tongue:.

I could tell you were coming from a frustrating position and the fact some have reached this level of frustration is telling and a feedback in itself.

I have no doubt we will figure this out together!

Cheers

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83

Check out the discord chat before posting here.!!
There are clear answers to a few of your points.

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With the greycore thing, just wait until the team publishes the decentralization proposal.

And 6-18 months everything is still perfectly fine.
6 months would be very good.
@DeFi_Whiskey

84

I echo a lot of the sentiment conveyed in this RFC. Like @Maggie pointed out, we have pivoted from the Darkpool model to being a Multichain project which turned out to be a great move and added a huge amount to the DeFi space and rewarded DN Owners. I cannot think of another project who has successfully managed to create a BTC Bridge like Ren…

However, I do agree with @DeFi_Whiskey with regard to the lack of communication and updates from Ren Labs, I myself have found it hard recently to keep faith.

Ultimately I support the proposal for Subnets, as I believe the Team has the best interest/intentions for the Ren protocol and Darknode Owners. My concerns are like others, we can make this pivot but how do we attract developers & projects to build on Ren. By doing so it would appear we are trying to compete with the likes of Avalanche & Polkadot who are a lot better funded, already equipped with a huge Team of Developers & projects and a lot better known. It feels like over the last 2 years the majority of crypto has forgotten what the Ren Project is, we are not ever mentioned in bridge overview or comparisons…

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