Moonriver is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain that operates as a parachain on the Kusama network. Being EVM-compatible allows Ethereum-based applications to deploy on Moonriver.
The network offers developers features, including deploying Solidity smart contracts, Web3-compatible API, oracle data feeds, and Ethereum network bridges. MOVR is the utility and governance token of the network, which can be used for network governance, pay transaction fees, earning rewards through providing liquidity and staking.
MOVR is the utility and governance token of Moonriver, used for the following use cases:
Transaction Fees: Users can pay gas fees and execute smart contracts with MOVR.
Staking: Users can stake MOVR to become a validator or delegate to participate in the network consensus and are rewarded with MOVR.
Governance: Enables MOVR token holders to nominate council members and participate in voting on the network.
Liquidity Mining: Provide liquidity on Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) built on the Moonriver blockchain (i.e. Solarbeam) to earn a portion of the exchange fees.
Moonriver consists of the following major components working in conjunction:
Kusama: Kusama acts as the public test environment (Canary Network) for projects before launching on Polkadot. Moonriver is the Kusama ecosystem version of Moonbeam (GLMR) in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Parachains: Parachains are independent blockchains (Shards) that are able to connect to Kusama.
Crowdloans: It is a method for projects to fundraise for a parachain slot on the Kusama network. Users temporarily lock their KSM in exchange for a reward from the project team, often in the form of the projectās native tokens.
Slot Auctions: For projects to operate as a parachain on Kusama, they would have to win a slot in the parachain auction. Moonriver won the second slot auction via a crowdloan, thus securing a Kusama parachain for 48 weeks (from June 29th 2021 to May 13th 2022).
The project raised 205,935 KSM tokens from 5,977 contributors in the Moonriver crowdloan for the Kusama parachain slot auction.
As at November 8th 2021, the total token supply of MOVR is 10,145,647 and the circulating supply is 2,185,399 (~21.54% of the total token supply).
Learn more about the token distribution of MOVR here.