Moonriver — the „Bigger Brother“ of Moonbeam
In the previous article, we focused on the project of Moonbeam, the DeFi HUB based on the Polkadot ecosystem where we introduced a few promising projects that certainly are worth your attention. If you’ve by any accident missed it, we got you a link for you.
Just from the start, Moonriver can be considered as one of the most active dApp platforms on Kusama from the current TOP 10. Since the last topic was dedicated to Moonbeam, Kusama as its companion couldn’t be simply skipped. So, let’s explore it together!
Just before we start, let’s make a brief recap on what actually Moonriver is. As an Ethereum-compatible, smart-contract parachain on the Kusama network, it won the 2nd slot in the first batch of parachain auctions back in June 2021.
It is intended to create a co-network to Moonbeam, with frequent code shipments and updates where it will provide a permanently incentivized canary network in order to provide simple access to assets and users on Kusama and the other parachains without a need of implementing any major changes.
At first, the new code will be shipped to Moonriver where it can be tested and verified under real economic conditions. Once proven, the same code will be shipped to Moonbeam on Polkadot. It is important to remind that Moonriver has native compatibility with the most popular Ethereum wallets, developer tools, and other integrations, providing an easy expansion point for Ethereum projects.
Just a half a year since the first launch in June 2021, Moonriver has established itself as the go-to destination for building applications in the Kusama ecosystem. As you can see on the ecosystem map down below, over 100 projects have deployed to the network with new ones launching regularly. Notably, there are a lot of native projects like Solarbeam and Moonwell, as well as multi-chain projects like SushiSwap and Lido which are going to be closely reviewed a few lines below, so stay focused!
As for the latest news a new milestone could be highlighted: the Moonbeam Foundation has successfully secured a parachain slot on Kusama. The Foundation has decided to self-fund this slot extension where Moonriver is a community-led parachain on Kusama. To ensure its place as a parachain, Moonriver proactively bid and won a slot in the 27th Kusama parachain auction during the 20–27 lease period. The result is even greater as the auction began at block # 11592600 and bidding ended on Block # 11691600 and resulted in a secured slot for Moonriver until March 2023. Congrats!
Now, let’s introduce some projects that should definitely not escape your attention. Shall we?
Houses of Rome ($) — A grand strategy crypto RPG
TVL: $12,470,994 / Users: ??? / APY: ?% / ATH: $1,679.53 / ATL: $24.35 / MC: $32,637,809
Houses of Rome was created as a crypto RPG (role-playing game) inspired by games like Runescape, Crusader Kings, and Mount & Blade. Houses of Rome also called “RomeDAO” is a community project with no central team involved that is built entirely by the community and for the community. It creates a better, more cooperative RPG by unlocking the true potential of NFTs and Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
Everything in Houses of Rome happens on the Warmap, which is simply a virtual chessboard that provides players opportunities for PvP battles, marketplace trade including exchange of items from battles as NFTs, or collecting, building, and arranging everything necessary for the expansion of Rome.
The DAO has already self-organized into “houses”, where a collection of users must rally together 2% of token supply and verify via Snapshot vote. Each house is allotted with 2 senators, 2 scholars and others who altogether as an organization of aligned contributors work together both in and out of the game. Out of game, houses act as the base of the community’s governance structure. For now, the houses have already been organized as follows: House of Chaos: ecosystem, Kings: marketing, Consuls: governance and community, Moonsama: engineering and marketing, Kek: community & marketing, Grapes: community & marketing, Sempronia: engineering, Spoons: storytelling & marketing.
If you find any suitable for you, just make a pick. To do so, you need to go through the onboarding flow which includes:
- Connecting (or creating) a MetaMask account
- Connecting to the Moonriver Network (Houses of Rome is played on the EVM-compatible chain) and purchasing their native token $MOVR
- Purchasing $ROME from the in-game DEX (The Exchange)
- Choosing a Username
- Finally, choosing a House that should be chosen very wisely. After that nothing stays in your way of deep dive into the world of Rome.
At the time of the writing of this article, there are 1.036 million $Rome staked which is 86% of the total supply. Currently, the game is in v0.1.0: Warmap v2.0, Profiles, Bank of Rome, Home Page, AMM Integration.
Multichain ($MULTI) — Cross-Chain Router Protocol (CRP), envisioned to be the ultimate router for Web3
TVL: $6.61bm / Users: ??? / APY: ?% / ATH: $33.64 / ATL: $9.46 / MC: $183,717,193
In short, Multichain is the ultimate Router for web3. It is an infrastructure developed for arbitrary cross-chain interactions.
Illustration on how Multichain works
The following Multichain may be quite unknown to many of you as it was originally born on the 20th of July 2020 under a name of Anyswap. It started as a service enabling communication between diverse blockchains. As it became a standard, each blockchain has its own unique services that it provides, its own community and its own development ecosystem. Now the project is rather targeting reaching the next level for consumers in the first place as the need for a fast, secure, inexpensive and reliable way to exchange value, data and exercise control between the chains seems indispensable.
The solutions developed by Multichain allow almost all blockchains to inter-operate. There is no restriction to any chain. If you grab Ethereum based chains (e.g. Binance Smart Chain), or different Layer 2 chains requiring finality to Ethereum (e.g. Polygon), or a network of Parachains (e.g. Moonbeam in the Polkadot ecosystem), or Bitcoin types of chains (e.g. Litecoin), or COSMOS chains (e.g. Terra), the result will be always the same. These are either already all integrated, or on the way for their integration. With support for all ECDSA and EdDSushiSwap ($SUSHI) — A fully decentralized protocol for automated liquidity provision
SA encrypted chains, Multichain is almost universally applicable as an interoperable layer. Multichain is now without a doubt the leader in the cross-chain field, with a rapidly expanding family of chains (currently 26) and daily volumes well in excess of $100 million (https://anyswap.net). Its sustained daily volume of more than $100 million, its total value locked in excess of $5 billion and last but not least its thousands of daily users are the best testaments to its popularity and security.
SushiSwap ($SUSHI) — A fully decentralized protocol for automated liquidity provision
TVL: $,m / Users: ??? / APY: ?% / ATH: $? / ATL: $? / MC: $?
If you are looking for swapping, earnings, stack yields, lending, borrowing, or leveraging, you are at the right address! You can find all of it packed in one place, on a decentralized, community-driven platform. And yes, Moonriver got on SushiSwap!
What is SushiSwap? It is an automated market-making (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX) that seeks to incentivize a network of users to operate a platform where users can buy and sell crypto assets. One of a growing number of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, SushiSwap allows users to trade cryptocurrencies without the need for a central operator administrator. This means that decisions relating to the SushiSwap software are made solely by holders of its native cryptocurrency, SUSHI. Anyone holding a balance of the asset can propose changes to how it operates and can vote on submitted proposals by other users.
There is money to be made. Swapping and providing liquidity is more or less identical to experience users have come to expect on SushiSwap. The only difference, as with any new chain, is that you will need to bridge liquidity to Moonriver to use it. Will SUSHI still be called SUSHI when it is on Moonriver, or will it have a new symbol? While the token symbol will stay the same, any given token has a different contract address on Ethereum in comparison with Moonriver.
For instance, on Ethereum, the contract address for Sushi is:
- 0x6b3595068778dd592e39a122f4f5a5cf09c90fe2
on Moonriver it is:
- 0xf390830df829cf22c53c8840554b98eafc5dcbc2
You can always check the contract address of the tokens in your wallet on Moonriver via the Moonriver Blockscout.
If you are interested in Sushi on Moonbeam, we are happy to announce that it’ll get there soon! Sushi is however currently available on Moonriver.
LIDO ($LDO) — Liquidity for staked assets. Simplified and secure staking for digital assets.
TVL: $,m / Users: ??? / APY: ?% / ATH: $? / ATL: $? / MC: $?
Total staking assets: $14,746,369,201 / Total rewards paid: $293,435,131 / Stakers: 81,996
WEB: https://lido.fi
Illustration on How LIDO works
User-friendly, decentralized staking solution that lowers the entry barriers for staking? That’s Lido — the project that enables you to stake even a fraction of an ETH on Ethereum 2.0 and earn a passive income. Furthermore, it eliminates certain obstacles related to understanding the technicalities or keeping your system running 24/7. What Lido offers you is another ERC20 token called stETH which is provided on a 1:1 ratio for the staked ETH. And as you’re used to with your ETH now, you can trade and transfer your stETH across decentralized finance protocols. For staked ETH on Lido, the ETH rewards are equal proportionally to the size of your stake compared to the total staked ETH. Tokenize staked ETH could be used as collateral (for example in Aave) and consequently got more liquidity in ETH through it. Consequently, you can leverage quite a lot in Eth 2.0 staking. The only question is of how much leverage there will be in staking.
About the Integration
As the largest and most-utilized liquid staking protocol in the world governed by the Lido DAO, with roots in Ethereum staking, where expansion to Polkadot is inevitable, Lido selected Moonbeam to provide the underlying parachain infrastructure and cross-chain integrations. With Ethereum — compatible smart contract functionality on their side, Lido will just use familiar Ethereum tools and existing code to get to market quickly. This integration introduces liquid staking to Moonriver and Moonbeam users at the same opportunity as on the ETH network. Now DOT holders will have the ability to stake their assets while at the same time accessing the liquidity of that staked position. The deployment of Lido provides a critical building block for the growing DeFi ecosystem assets.
MixBytes Launches Lido Liquid staking for Kusama on Moonriver
Your attention should be drawn to an announcement for the launch of Lido Liquid staking for Kusama on Moonriver by MixBytes at the beginning of March. Their goal is simple — the development of a truly decentralized and non-custodial way to utilize the “frozen” potential of staked Kusama tokens. There has already been a release of APR reward simulation where numbers performed as a preliminary simulation of rewards with and without the Lido liquid staking dynamic allocation system does not look bad at all. The actual result may however vary and will be optimized throughout the life of the protocol of course.
Simulation parameters:
- For the Lido staking scenario
- Lido protocol fee is 10% of net staker rewards
- A stake allocated per node is 1000 KSM (200000 USD)
- Overall stake in the Lido protocol is 100000 KSM (20000000 USD)
- # Of Validator nodes selected by Lido protocol is 100
- For average “uninformed” staking
- A stake of 100000 KSM (52200 USD) equal to Lido simulation allocated to all validator nodes in the active set excluding nodes with 100% fee (766 nodes).
- Simulation results
→100000 KSM total stake:
- Lido APR — 18.15%
- Uniformed staking APR — 10.63%
→10000 KSM total stake (test cap):
- Lido APR — 19.69%
- Uniformed staking APR — 10.64%
You can see all nodes' performance rated here
Ocean protocol ($OCEAN) — Tools for the Web3 Data Economy
web: https://oceanprotocol.com
TVL: $,m / Users: ??? / APY: ?% / ATH: $? / ATL: $? / MC: $?
Source: medium
As you all know, lately has been increased recognition that the web2 model is broken. That’s one of the reasons why Ocean as an open-source protocol aimed at allowing businesses and individuals to exchange and monetize data and data-based services, emerged.
Ocean’s unique application of web3 technology focused on creating open and decentralized data markets is leading the path towards avoiding such abuses. Built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, the Ocean protocol uses ‘datatokens’ to gate access to data sets. The tokens are then redeemed by users who need access to the information. Data sets on the platform will be available without the data having to leave the hands of those who store it. One of the goals of Ocean’s software is to facilitate the data exchange, linking users who need data or do not have resources to store it with those who on the other hand have resources to spare. In return, providers are awarded Ocean’s native cryptocurrency.
The OCEAN token, coin or simply crypto is designed to be multipurpose and is used to validate the best datatokens, allowing users to both participate in governance and trade the data. For example, Ocean Market, a marketplace that facilitates transactions between different parties, created by the Ocean team, is a place where datatokens are publicly available for trade.
Moonwell ($MFAM) — Open lending and borrowing DeFi protocol on Moonbeam & Moonriver
web: https://moonwell.fi
TVL: $253.25m / Users: ??? / APY: ?% / ATH: $0.219012 / ATL: $0.01814076 / MC: $?
Moonwell is an open lending and borrowing DeFi protocol on Moonbeam & Moonriver. Moonwell’s composable design can accommodate a full range of DeFi applications in the greater Polkadot and Kusama (DotSama) ecosystem.
Source: moonwell.fi
Moonwell Apollo, the Moonriver deployment, will be the first deployment given Moonriver’s already sufficient DEX liquidity and Chainlink oracle support. Moonriver is where new products are expected to be incubated first and developed prior to being deployed on Moonbeam.
What most DeFi platforms suffer from are in Moonwell’s point of view the biggest opportunities for development and improvement. These are, among others, mainly lack of security and trust, poor user experience, lack of education and information or poor community engagement.
The next step on the way is Moonwell Artemis, Moonwell’s Moonbeam deployment, which will be activated by the Moonwell community once favorable economic conditions on Moonbeam are met.
New Projects coming soon on Moonriver:
Insurace (INSUR)
InsurAce.io is a decentralized protocol that’s main offer is reliable insurance services. Providing decentralized finance (DeFi) assets with flexible and reliable coverage to benefits users include cross-chain coverage, wallet availability, low insurance premiums and high return on investment. In more detail, the InsurAce.io could be defined as both a DeFi and an insurance protocol with two available platforms providing its main services: insurance and investment. They function in a synergetic manner in order to provide stable profit to the insured, the insurer and also the investor. All this offers what the platform calls zero-premium insurance. Portfolio-based product design or unique pricing models are coupled with sustainable investment returns that can provide users ultra-low premiums close to 0. Avoiding a KYC process to remain anonymous is just another beneficial option for users.
Kilt (KILT)
A closer look at KILT you can have in our previous article.
Our last word
If you like this article, consider supporting us by nominating your tokens to our Moonriver collator, where is possible to delegate from a minimum of 5 MOVRs. APY is currently set to 21%.
Also, we are raising our position in our Moonbeam collator and we need your help to get into the active set, so if you have a bag of GLMR, you will definitely make us happy if you will pick our POLKADOTTERS collator.
