Moonriver (MOVR) Begins Producing Blocks on Kusama Network

Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam has successfully secured a parachain slot for its sister network Moonriver on Kusama.

Moonriver Blocks in Production

Today, Moonriver bagged the second parachain slot on the Kusama network with a successful community-oriented crowdloan of more than 205,935 KSM raised from 5,977 contributors from the world over. The U.S. dollar equivalent value of the raised KSM is close to $45 million.

Shortly after securing a parachain slot, Moonriver is now successfully producing blocks on the Kusama network and has also commenced a steady rollout of its Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform.

Akin to its sister network Moonbeam on Polkadot, the Moonriver smart contract platform offers robust features beyond Ethereum compatibility and basic EVM support, such as making it easier for developers to build applications in the Kusama ecosystem.

It is worthy of note that projects powered by Moonriver will be able to leverage the same smart contracts languages, Ethereum-based accounts, developer tools, base-level integrations, and all other required services that they would require. All of this, in the new extended Kusama environment.

Once live on Moonriver, will be able to natively interact with Kusama as well as with other parachains connected to the network.

Commenting on the development, Derek Yoo, Founder of Moonbeam, said:

“The Moonriver launch is the result of a huge amount of effort from a large number of contributors, extending far beyond the PureStake development team.We are grateful to our technology and ecosystem partners who helped make this happen, including Parity, Web3 Foundation, our collator community, our ambassadors, and all of the contributors to the Moonriver crowdloan.”

Adding:

“As Moonriver completes its launch sequence and enables full functionality in the coming weeks, we look forward to supporting all of our ecosystem partners who plan to deploy to the network.”

Phases of the Launch

Although Moonriver has secured a parachain slot on the Kusama network with its block production already having commenced at 11:30 AM UTC, it is actually the first phase of Moonriver’s launch. Notably, the Moonriver network will gradually introduce new functionalities in line with the four-phase launch process to ensure network stability post-deployment.

Currently, the Moonriver network is in Phase 0 and is expected to take about 1-2 weeks to complete each phase.

In Phase 0, the network is essentially centralized as the genesis block is launched. At this point, the Moonriver team controls network governance and infrastructure. Next, in Phase 1, after ensuring the network is stable enough, third-party collators will be added and the network starts the decentralization process. Notably, Moonriver is the first network to have a decentralized collator set and a custom parachain staking pallet.

Phase 2 of the launch is concerned with governance where the Moonriver team will issue a runtime upgrade and enable governance.

In Phase 3, after ensuring the stability of network governance, the Sudo key (which grants the Moonriver team control) will be eliminated to transfer the control of the network to token holders.

Finally, Phase 4 will witness the full launch of the network where balance transfers and EVM will be enabled. During this phase, developers and end-users will have seamless access to all functions of Moonriver, which includes the ability to transfer funds, participate in the Moonriver staking system, deploy smart contracts, and claim crowdloan participation rewards.

Post the successful rollout of Phase 4, projects that have already been deployed to Moonbase Alpha, the Moonbeam TestNet, will start deploying to Moonriver.

Moonriver is committed to being decentralized through and, therefore, offering its crowdloan participants MOVR network tokens worth 30 percent of the total genesis network tokens. This will ensure the Moonriver community has a high degree of control over the network soon after its launch.

Moonriver’s parachain lease period will last for a total of 48 weeks, after which it will return the KSM received from crowdloan participants to the respective contributors.