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Moonbeam is a set of tools for developers for creating decentralized applications, or dApps. The main goal of the project is to enable Polkadot users to interact with the Ethereum blockchain, and to enable developers to port dApps, originally built for the Ethereum blockchain, to the Polkadot ecosystem.
The project is essentially a Layer-1 blockchain, providing full and comprehensive interoperability with the Ethereum network. Moonbeam is presented on the Polkadot network as a parachain. It also allows creating applications in Solidity, alternatively to Substrate, which is Polkadot's ‘native’ tool for creating blockchains and dApps.
Moonbeam won the second parachain slot auction on Polkadot. The protocol completed its thre-phases launch process to Polkadot on January 11, 2022, two years after its testnet launch. More than 35 million DOT (approximately $1.4 billion USD) was contributed from over 200,000 participants. The contributed DOT tokens are used to cover the cost of the parachain’s 96-week lease.
PureStake is the company responsible for the development of Moonbeam. The team held two successful investment rounds allowing it to secure a total of $7.4 million from Hypersphere Ventures, CoinFund, Binance Labs, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, and IOSG Ventures, among others. PureStake is also a recipient of a grant from the Web3 Foundation for making Moonbeam compatible with Ethereum.
As a smart contract blockchain platform, Moonbeam is built in the Rust programming language while also using the Substrate framework that enables the parachain to provide key blockchain services and features. These include basic blockchain data structures, peer-to-peer networks, consensus mechanisms, accounts, assets, and balances. Smart contracts on Moonbeam can be built using Solidity or any other language that can compile smart contracts into EVM-compatible byte code.
Moonbean aims to provide a secure environment for developing, testing, and executing smart contracts, compatible with the existing Ethereum developer tools. The entire architecture is designed with one goal in mind — to make the Ethereum network (including multiple ERC-20 tokens) available to Polkadot blockchain users via Moonbeam. The key value of this interaction boils down to a few points: efficient scaling on Ethereum, reduced cost of transactions, and access to smart contract features for other Polkadot projects.
Ethereum-based projects can benefit from using Moonbeam as it helps to implement a hybrid approach, where dApps exist both on Ethereum and Moonbeam at the same time. Also, the projects can interact with the Polkadot network. As for the Polkadot ecosystem projects, they can leverage the Ethereum development toolchain and utilize functions that have not yet been added to Polkadot. By leveraging the cross-chain function, developers can use Moonbeam to build decentralized applications and reach out to users on other chains.
Moonbeam provides a full EVM implementation, a Web3 compatible API, and bridges that connect Moonbeam to the Ethereum network. This allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and make their dApps live on Ethereum and Moonbeam with minimal changes. Moonbeam’s ChainBridge will allow asset transfers between Ethereum and Moonbeam chains.
The gas fees Moonbeam users pay are denominated in GLMR tokens, which can be stored on the Metamask wallet, among others. In order to be able to add GLMR tokens, users first need to add the Moonbeam network to Metamask.
Moonbeam staking mechanism allows GLMR token holders to delegate their tokens in favor of collators on the Moonbeam app. In this process, rewards go to the top 300 nominators with the largest number of tokens staked. There is a useful page showing the minimal bond of nominated GLMR needed to make it into the top 300. The mentioned website also contains other on-chain information about collators to help nominators in choosing one. The list of the nominators ranked by their staked GLMR can be found on this page.
Though there’s no fee for staking on Moonbeam, collators get 20% of the annual inflation for staking tokens. No commissions are deducted from the Parachain Staking rewards.
Moonbeam's token is called Glimmer (GLMR). It is used for paying transaction fees, decentralized management, and securing the network by staking mechanism.
There will be a total of 1,000,000,000 GLMR tokens with an annual inflation rate of 5%. More information about the token allocation can be viewed here.
Moonbeam is developed by PureStake, a team of almost 40 people. It is led by CEO Derek Yoo, an entrepreneur and technical director of the Fuze cloud computing platform. COO Stefan Mehlhor was formerly one of the top managers of Samsung Pay. Vice President of Engineering Tim Baldwin worked as an engineer and DevOps at Google, VISA, Facebook, Uber, and a number of other corporations.
Moonbeam has been audited by Srlabs and Nccgroup, but reports have not yet been published.
Moonbeam has a sister-parachain called Moonriver. It is a community incentivized canary network based on Kusama. It is used as an experimental environment to test dApps or their features before releasing them on Moonbeam, but at the same time since not all dApps require the strong security of Moonbeam, Moonriver exists as a separate independent network with real economic conditions.
Moonbeam and Moonriver ecosystems consist of over 100 projects, integrations, and collaborations. Projects deployed on Moonbeam include Curve, Beamswap, Beefy Finance, and others.
Moonbeam confirmed data access partnerships with oracles such as Chainlink and BandProtocol. And to boost the DeFi and NFT market in the Polkadot ecosystem, the team has partnered with Seascape Network. In addition, Moonbeam collaborates with Ocean Protocol. Ocean smart contracts enable users to publish data, stake on data, and buy data in the Polkadot ecosystem in an open and secure fashion.
Since the project has already been launched as a parachain and applications are already running on it, the team will now focus on interoperability with other Polkadot parachains. There will also be a strong focus on developing the Moonriver and Moonbeam ecosystems, including deploying integrations and partnerships, as well as adding rewards and bounty programs.
https://docs.moonbeam.network/
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Last updated: Aug 22, 2023
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