22 May RenBTC Quietly Goes Live in Latest Bid to Bring Bitcoin to Ethereum
The latest implementation of bitcoin (BTC) on the Ethereum blockchain quietly went live this week.
There are 1.24 renBTC live on the Ethereum mainnet now, according to Etherscan. Three sources with knowledge of the project have confirmed this is the Ren smart contract, live ahead of its launch announcement.
Kain Warwick of Synthetix tweeted Wednesday that he was the first person to hold a full bitcoin in renBTC.
However, there’s no way yet for members of the public to mint additional renBTC, the CEO of the company behind the project told CoinDesk in an email.
“While the smart contracts have been deployed on Ethereum, RenVM itself is not actually on mainnet. This is because RenVM is a distinct network separate to Ethereum. The final mainnet subzero version of RenVM won’t be deployed until later,” Taiyang Zhang wrote. “The minted renBTC so far has been from our own internal testing [and] Kain from Synthetix testing the system. The public hasn’t been able to mint renBTC…