This thread does not make justice of the awesomeness of the project. The value proposition here is huge.
The mainnet is in beta right now, the deploying of darknode is stricked to the only team. However it will be opened soon to anyone willing to bond 100K REN per node.
It could represent a good revenue stream, people should definetely dig into this project.

https://medium.com/republicprotocol/wrapped-bitcoin-wbtc-a-bitcoin-token-community-project-started-by-bitgo-kyber-and-republic-599c9abc8139

This is one of the latets cool update: RP is going to build a erc20 version of BTC pegged 1:1 by bitgo.