NEAR Intents is the first project that can genuinely let you quit CEXes. You keep your keys and still get cross-chain deposits and withdrawals, smooth confidential trading and perps. You can even connect an AI agent to your account and let it trade Polymarket or anywhere, without ever handing it the keys.
I've always wanted to build something great. It's why I became a programmer.
When @renprotocol was abandoned and left for dead, and the community refused to let it die, we had to figure out what to do for v2. We had to decide whether to make incremental tweaks to an unsustainable v1, or risk it all to build something new — without knowing what it would even be but hoping we'd come up with something.
We decided to go for something new. It felt like jumping off a cliff and trying to build a plane on the way down, because we'd inherited the remnants of a bankruptcy and broken community without a product.
Quietly and relentlessly, all day, every day, we did the work. When we weren't heard from in public, we were researching, tinkering, experimenting, and getting feedback from other projects. After enough time, we came up with something that we became obsessed with. It's great, it's uniquely Ren, and it's our baby.
I can't think of anything more fulfilling than to build something of your own with a great team, share it with an open community of people and users from all around the world, and help grow it into an essential piece of the global financial infrastructure.
That's what motivates me.
Ren v2 is coming.
We are heads down on it with a team of seven chads and are confident as ever that it will have a more outsized and sustainable impact on DeFi than Ren v1.
We not only intend to address the more obvious protocol design and governance lessons that our community learned through Ren v1, but also some key constraints that we consider to be existential bottlenecks to the wider ecosystem.
We are hoping to be out of stealth soon and can't wait to share everything about what we've been up to.
The road has been long and bumpy, but Ren's brightest days are ahead.