Interoperability has become one of the issues driving the cryptocurrency market, and as the blockchain ecosystem evolves into a federated network of layer-one protocols, the importance of communication and efficiency between decentralized applications (dApps) will also increase.

Ren (REN), a blockchain protocol designed to provide interoperability and liquidity between different blockchain platforms, has been gaining traction in the financial sector over the past month and a half, with decentralization (DeFi) on the rise.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView show that after hitting a low of $ 0.41 on August 9, the REN price rose 185% to a daily high of $ 1.16 on September 15, when the Trading volume increased million.

The three reasons that REN is increasing in price are the steadily increasing activity and total value of RenVM, the introduction of the bridge to Arbitrum, and the release of RenVM Greycore on the network’s test network.

Volume increased and total value locked

REN’s bullish momentum can be found in the total network volume and Total Value Locked (TVL) data.

By 2021, new chains have been added to the list of supported bridges, which currently include Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche and Arbitrum.

Each new bridge helped increase the volume and TVL in the Ren network, which coincided with the movements in REN p.

Bridge to Arbitrum REN price

The September 15 price spike was largely due to the release of the Arbitrum Bridge, an Ethereum (ETH) Arbitrum Layer 2 scaling solution designed to host popular decentralized applications.

The Ethereum network has been plagued by high fees and delayed transaction times, which has hampered the ability of many users to use DeFi, or unusable token (NFT) -related protocols.

Arbitrum’s low-cost environment has proven to be an attractive DeFi environment for BTC holders who can now switch to a Layer 2 solution and interact with renBTC on the network.

The total value locked on Arbitrum via the Ren protocol was $ 7.75 million as of September 15th and is indicated by the green line in the graph above with locked values.

Related: Solana and Arbitrum are offline while Ethereum avoids attacks

REN is moving towards decentralization

The third reason REN’s activity has increased is the release of RenVM Greycore on the network’s test network on September 13, a step taken as the project works towards its goal of full decentralization.

Greycore is a semi-decentralized collection of validation nodes operated by renowned DeFi projects and helps add an extra layer of protection to the protocol.

The first project Greycore joins is BadgerDAO, a DeFi project that focuses on building projects that bring BTC to DeFi.

According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro, market conditions have been quite favorable for REN for some time.

The VORTECS ™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historical and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points such as market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.

As can be seen on the graph above, the VORTECS ™ Score for REN turned green on September 13th and climbed to a high of 71 on September 14th, as REN prices began to rise 72% over the next two days.