FTX and Alameda to receive all Ren Protocol assets

Ren Protocol will move all assets to the cold wallets of the holders — those in bankruptcy proceedings involving FTX and Alameda Research.

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— Ren (@renprotocol) April 12, 2023

According to the statement, the platform’s team has been instructed to transfer the funds before the infrastructure and systems are shut down to safeguard custody.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s firms acquired Ren Protocol in February 2021. The founder and head of the platform, Tai Yang Zhang, then stated, that access to Alameda’s resources would help the project “move to the next stage of decentralisation”.

In December 2022, the Ren Protocol team allowed for the possibility of shutting down the protocol and urged users withdraw the remaining assets worth about $15 million. The developers noted that Alameda controls part of the infrastructure and they cannot accurately predict further developments.

The protocol enables the issuance of “wrapped tokens” to use assets across other blockchains. The network’s most popular token is renBTC on Ethereum.

The project was initially launched as a dark pool crypto platform called Republic Protocol. In February 2018 the startup raised about $34 million from several hedge funds.

In comments on the Ren Protocol’s statement, some users expressed confusion that FTX and Alameda “authorised and directed” the decentralized platform to transfer the assets.

A number of commentators speculated about a possible fraudulent scheme by the team to move the funds, while others considered the possibility of making money on a short in the REN token.

Over the last 24 hours the coin has fallen 8.8% and is trading at around $0.098 (CoinGecko). At one point the price slid to $0.096.

In December 2022, the DeFi platform MakerDAO shut down the ability to borrow in the DAI stablecoin backed by renBTC.