Ren DAO to mint 200 million REN tokens to fund Ren 2.0 development following Alameda’s collapse

In light of Alameda’s bankruptcy saga, the Ren community has agreed to mint 200 million REN tokens to fund future development. The DAO will also create a foundation to lead future expansions.

Ren Protocol was acquired by Alameda Research in February 2021. Since then, the crypto trading firm has funded the Ren development team on a quarterly basis. Things however took a different turn in November after the FTX Group, which Alameda is a part of, began Chapter 11 proceedings for bankruptcy. The Ren team recently revealed in a blog post that it had just enough capital ($160,000) to last until the end of the year, forcing it to consider other options for funding.

That said, the DAO has voted to mint 200 million new tokens to raise capital. A Snapshot vote initiated by Ren Ecosystem Advocate Maximillian Roszko ended today. The community had four options to either mint 50 million, 100 million, 150 million, or 200 million REN tokens, as well as a fifth option of rejecting the funding plan as a whole.

More than 80% of the votes were in favor of the 200M option. At current market prices, Ren could raise up to $13 million.

As part of the proposal, the DAO will set up the Ren Foundation, which will fund Ren 2.0. The Ren 2.0 upgrade was announced back in August as a planned pivot to a community-run, open-source project. The original plan was to roll it out slowly. However, the dev team will have to expedite the process since Alameda reportedly owns the IP rights to Ren 1.0.

The rough cost for setting up a Swiss Foundation is 100,000 CHF in total, which is roughly $107,000 at current rates […] Following the legal set up of the Ren Foundation, it would likely need to conduct a raise to fund continued development of Ren 2.0.

Meanwhile, the capital raised from the minted tokens will be between the Ren Foundation and darknode operators.