Moonriver (MOVR) is the native token of a parachain with the same name on Kusama. The parachain is the proving ground for smart contracts before they are implemented on Moonbeam, a smart contract platform based on the Polkadot blockchain and Moonriver’s sister project.

MOVR went live in August 2021. Its price rose sharply after that from about $73 to a high of about $494 in September of that year. The price dipped to $239 by mid-October 2021, and then rose to $443 in November 2021. It subsequently crashed, falling to below $100 by February 2022.

Moonriver’s sister token, Moonbeam (GLMR), collapsed in value after launching at the start of 2022, falling from $15 per token to about $2 by May 2022.

Moonriver started with a supply of 10 million tokens, with 30% issued as part of a crowd loan – similar to a token sale. The rest is being used to incentivize the network’s growth.

MOVR is an inflationary token without a maximum supply. The project aims to increase the supply by 5% a year. The tokens added through an inflationary mechanism will be reinvested in the protocol for such uses as renting a parachain slot on the Kusama network and paying rewards to stakers.

Whenever a transaction is executed on Moonriver, 80% of the fees are burned – permanently removed from circulation by being sent to a wallet that nobody controls – and 20% are sent to Moonriver’s treasury.

Moonriver is a smart contract platform on Kusama, which is a blockchain network for experimental Polkadot smart contracts. As such, Moonriver is a so-called “CanaryNet” for Moonbeam. The Moonbeam Foundation, which acts as the steward of the Moonbeam network, describes Moonriver as a “community-led experiment.”

MOVR is Moonriver’s utility token. It is used to settle transaction fees and pay rewards to stakers and as a governance token. Governance tokens let holders determine the future of the protocol. The utility of MOVR is similar to that of GLMR, although the token distribution isn’t identical to accommodate the divergent goals of the two networks.

Moonbeam, the non-experimental version of Moonriver, is a smart contract parachain on Polkadot. Ethereum developers can use it to redeploy projects they have already built in Solidity, Ethereum’s smart contract programming language. Moonriver further reduces the cost of porting a decentralized application from Ethereum to Polkadot by allowing developers to connect popular tools like MetaMask, Hardhat and Truffle, as well as popular JavaScript libraries and Ethereum accounts.

Both Moonriver and Moonbeam are the creations of PureStake, a cryptocurrency software development firm that builds infrastructure for proof-of-stake networks like Polkadot and Algorand.

PureStake, which was founded in 2019, is led by CEO Derek Yoo, who has a background in cloud computing. Stefan Mehlhorn, who previously worked at Samsung Electronics America, is PureStakes’’ chief operating officer, and Tim Baldwin is its vice president of engineering. In March 2021, the company raised $6 million in a Series A funding round that was led by CoinFund. In September 2020, it raised $1 million in a seed funding round that was led by Hypersphere Ventures.