Moonriver is a community-led parachain with support for Solidity smart contracts running on Kusama, Polkadot’s sister chain. It is a companion network to decentralized smart contract platform Moonbeam, which runs on the Polkadot network as a parachain.
The Moonriver ecosystem provides a convenient platform for smart contract execution and decentralized applications (dApps) developed on Solidity to be deployed on Kusama for testing and verifying under actual economic conditions. Once the developers are satisfied with how their dApps operate, they can migrate them easily to Moonbeam on Polkadot.
Moonriver offers a test environment for developers seeking the versatility of Ethereum for development but with the added efficiencies of the Polkadot ecosystem. They can create dApps using Solidity - the most popular programming language for smart contracts and Ethereum-based dApps.
They can then deploy these dApps on Kusama’s parachain Moonriver and test them out, modifying the code until all issues are resolved. Once the dApp is ready for launch, they can migrate the dApp from Moonriver to the Moonbeam parachain on Polkadot.
MOVR is the native cryptocurrency of Moonriver and serves as the utility token of the network. It is used for paying transaction fees when executing smart contracts and communicating with dApps, incentivizes validators, and enables the network's on-chain governance mechanism.
