Ren is an open sourse protocol, officially founded in 2017 by Taiyang Zhang and Loong Wang, under the name of Republic Protocol. This project was born as a response to the lack of support that existed at that time for the trade of OTC over-the-counter cryptocurrencies.
Basically Ren allows users, investors or traders to operate in the market without interruptions allowing the transfer of encryption between the blockchains to be transparent, easy and secure in a private model, completely decentralizing OTC. It takes advantage of RenVM technology, a network of virtual computers (Darknodes) that together form a kind of virtual machine that powers the network.
REN is the platform's native token, it was created based on the Ethereum ERC-20 blockchain. This allows transferring or exchanging supporting assets such as Bitcoin, ZCash, Bitcoin Cash, among others, on the Ethereum blockchain. Even though the REN token cannot be mined, it has gained a lot of popularity in recent times as it offers many other benefits to users.