The Republic Protocol launched two rounds of ICOs for the Republic token (REN) in 2018. The first was a private one which took place in January 2018 and raised $28 million. The 2nd, public ICO, was held a bit later in February and raised $4.8 million. Investors who took part in these ICOs, bought REN at a price of just over $0,05 per token. 56% of REN's total supply (1 billion) was sold during those ICOs. The network is built on Ethereum (ERC-20), cross-chain transactions are executed through ERC-20 tokens equivalents of the asset. Said simply, you aren't moving any actual Bitcoins. The technology behind Ren is quite sophisticated and can be hard to wrap your head around.