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Moonriver is a sister-parachain to Polkadot’s Moonbeam launched on the Kusama network in June 2021. The project is a community-led incentivized canary network that serves as an experimental environment for dApps aiming to be deployed on Moonbeam.
Similar to Moonbeam, Moonriver provides developers with a set of tools for creating decentralized applications that enable Kusama users to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Moonriver also allows porting dApps, originally built on Ethereum, to the Kusama relay chain.
Moonriver provides full and comprehensive interoperability with the Ethereum network. The parachain supports applications in Solidity, in parallel with Substrate, which is Kusama’s and Polkadot's ‘native’ framework for building dApps and blockchains.
PureStake, the company developing Moonriver and Moonbeam, received $6 million in a strategic funding round led by CoinFund. Binance Labs, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, and IOSG Ventures also participated in the round. Before that, the team received $1.4 million in a seed round led by Hypersphere Ventures. Aside from that, PureStake received a grant from the Web3 Foundation for making Moonbeam compatible with Ethereum.
Moonriver secured its parachain slot on Kusama in June 2021 after winning the second parachain auction by bonding a crowd loan of 205,935 KSM tokens from 5,977 participants. In March 2022, Moonriver once again secured its slot in the 27th Kusama parachain auction.
The Moonriver parachain was built with the main purpose to facilitate testing applications based on Ethereum smart contracts in the experimental environment of the Kusama network before those dApps are deployed on Polkadot’s Moonbeam. This enables the following project development scheme: first, the code written in Solidity is uploaded to Moonriver; then, it is inspected and tested; and finally, if no flaws or vulnerabilities are found, the application is ported to Moonbeam.
However, not all dApps from Moonriver eventually end up on Moonbeam, since not all dApps need such strong security guarantees. Thus, despite its strong affiliation with Moonbeam, since the two networks share the same testnet called Moonbase Alpha, Moonriver operates as a fully independent parachain with its unique landscape providing real economic conditions in the Kusama ecosystem.
Just like its sister parachain Moonbeam, Moonriver is a smart contract blockchain platform built with the use of the Rust programming language in the Substrate framework. This instance, however, does not interfere with the ability of dApp developers on Monriver to build their applications in Solidity or any other language capable of compiling smart contracts to be compatible with the EVM.
With the clever use of XCM, a Kusama native technology for cross-chain integrations, Moonriver is set to become a safe testing space for dApp creators aiming to build products compatible with the Ethereum network as well as with other parachains on Kusama. The whole architecture of Moonriver is designed to allow bridging applications and assets from other chains, including most used ERC-20 tokens, to Kusama. With all that, the network provides secure smart contracts support on Kusama combined with efficient scaling of Ethereum, and reasonably priced transaction fees.
Same as Moonbeam, Moonriver allows Ethereum-based projects to benefit by implementing a hybrid approach, where dApps exist both on Ethereum and Moonriver at the same time. The projects can interact with other applications on the Kusama network.
Moonriver provides developers with a full EVM implementation, a Web3-compatible API allowing interactions with dApps via crypto wallets, and bridges that connect the parachain to the Ethereum network. These features allow developers to deploy their smart contracts on Moonriver with ease, even if those were originally written in Solidity. With minimal changes, any dApp may go live both on Ethereum and Moonriver. Moreover, users may bridge assets from the Ethereum network to the Moonriver parachain using AnySwap.
The Moonriver staking mechanism allows MOVR token holders to delegate their tokens in favor of collators on the Moonriver app. The top 300 nominators with the largest number of tokens nominated receive rewards. The minimal number of nominated MOVR to make it into the top 300 can be found on the Stake MOVR website (the min. bond column). The same webpage displays up-to-date information about collators to help nominators in choosing one. Users can also see the list of nominators ranked by their staked MOVR on this page.
Collators get 20% of the annual inflation for staking tokens. The commission is never deducted from the Parachain Staking rewards.
Moonriver's utility token goes under the ticker MOVR. It is used for paying transaction fees, on-chain government, and securing the network through a staking mechanism.
There were a total of 10,000,000 MOVR tokens minted in the genesis block with an annual inflation rate set to 5%. Notably, there was no founders’ share of MOVR tokens at genesis as the whole parachain was tailored to become a community-owned network. More information about the token allocation can be viewed here.
PureStake is the team behind Moonbeam and Moonriver parachains. It consists of almost 40 people. PureStake’s CEO is a tech entrepreneur Derek Yoo, who previously worked as a technical director at the Fuze cloud computing platform. Stefan Mehlhor is the COO of PureStake, before that endeavor he had a seat on the directors board at Samsung Pay. Tim Baldwin is the Vice President of Engineering at Purestake. He has a rich tech background from his past experience working at Google, VISA, Facebook, Uber, and other companies.
There’s no information on whether Moonriver smart contracts were audited. Moonbeam has been audited by Srlabs and Nccgroup, but reports have not yet been published.
In February 2022, the whole Moonriver ecosystem was shaken by a hack of the Meter Passport token bridge. The attack resulted in a $3.3 million loss to Hundred Finance, an algorithmic lending protocol on Moonriver, causing cascading effects and liquidity troubles over the network. The Meter Passport team acknowledged the problem and took full responsibility for the event pledging to reimburse the Moonriver community from the project’s own reserves.
Moonriver and Moonbeam ecosystems consist of over 100 projects, integrations, and collaborations. Projects deployed on Moonriver include Moonwell, Elk Finance, Beefy Finance, Frax Finance, and others.
Moonriver also hosts a number of cross-chain and bridging solutions such as Solarbeam, Synapse, Connext, and others.
Moonriver plans to continue its development in parallel with its sister-chain Moonbean according to the networks’ shared roadmap. Most recent updates of the network were related to various XCM integrations with other Kusama projects. In the future, the team plans to work more on the XCM-EVM compatibility, while also building new governance features for further decentralization of the network.
https://docs.moonbeam.network/
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Last updated: Aug 22, 2023
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