Moonriver is a smart-contract parachain on Kusama that provides compatibility with the existing Ethereum developer toolchain and network. It is intended to be a companion network to Moonbeam, where it will provide a permanently incentivized canary network. New code will ship to Moonriver first, where it can be tested and verified under real economic conditions. Once proven, the same code will ship to Moonbeam on Polkadot. It does this by providing a full EVM implementation, a Web3-compatible API, and bridges that connect Moonriver to existing Ethereum networks. This allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonriver with minimal changes.
Like Moonbeam, Moonriver is a full Ethereum-like environment and works with industry-standard Ethereum tools, DApps, and protocols. By mirroring Ethereum’s Web3 RPC, accounts, keys, subscriptions, logs, and more, Moonriver minimizes the changes required to run existing Solidity smart contracts on the network. Ethereum projects can simply replicate their DApp and deploy it to Moonbeam using Hardhat, Truffle, Remix, and other popular deployment tools.
Moonriver (MOVR) is the utility token of the Moonriver Network, Moonbeam’s Kusama deployment that serves as a “CanaryNet” to the Moonbeam Network. As such, the token utility behaviors on Moonriver mirror that of Moonbeam. Some of the uses of the MOVR token on Moonriver include: - Supporting the gas metering of smart contract execution.
- Incentivizing collators and powering the mechanics around the creation of a decentralized node infrastructure on which the platform can run.
- Facilitating the on-chain governance mechanism including proposing referenda, electing council members, voting, etc.
- Paying for transaction fees on the network.
