Singapore – March 15, 2022 – Moonbeam, the fully Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on Polkadot, has announced that Karura’s native token, KAR, is now live on Moonriver, and Moonriver’s MOVR token can now be used on Karura. Once deposited on Moonriver as xcKAR (an XC-20 representation of KAR), the KAR token can be used across Moonriver’s active DeFi ecosystem. This collaboration is another integration made possible by XCM, the cross-consensus messaging format that makes native cross-chain interactions possible across the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems, without need of a bridge.
This integration unites two of the founding chains on Kusama by introducing a bidirectional HRMP channel: tokens can move freely to and from each parachain. MOVR can be used on Karura and will be listed on KaruraSwap in the coming days and will be considered as a future supported collateral type for minting stablecoins. Users can also deposit KAR to Moonriver through the DApp dashboard and, from there, be used across the DeFi ecosystem. The teams also plan to collaborate to bring the aUSD/kUSD stablecoin to Moonriver in the future.
Karura is the all-in-one DeFi hub of Kusama, offering a suite of financial applications such as liquid KSM staking, multi-collateralized stablecoin-backed cross-chain assets (kUSD), and an AMM DEX. KAR is the utility token that powers Karura through transaction fees, node incentives, governance, pallet deployment, and algorithmic risk adjustment. By integrating with parachains like Karura, Moonriver continues to expand its access to a larger ecosystem of Substrate-native tokens and assets.
The introduction of XC-20s enables native assets from other parachains, like KAR, to be used on Moonriver-based DApps as if they were ERC-20 tokens. As an XC-20, users can “deposit” tokens from elsewhere in the Kusama ecosystem, like Karura, to be used in Moonriver-based applications like Solarbeam and Zenlink. As the largest application ecosystem on Kusama, Moonriver presents new opportunities for KAR to be used and swapped. KAR holders can put their tokens to work in the increasingly interconnected Kusama ecosystem.
XC-20s conform to the ERC-20 technical fungible token standard, established as the technical standard for all smart contracts on Ethereum and Ethereum-compatible blockchains. Support for ERC-20 is one of the many ways Moonriver makes it easier for developers to re-deploy existing projects to Kusama and generally makes token creation much simpler. XC-20s are ERC-20 compatible but also Substrate-native assets building upon XCM functionality from Polkadot. Learn more about XCM.
About the Moonbeam Network
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. Like Moonriver, its sister parachain on Kusama, Moonbeam is expected to accumulate developer and user activity from the 80+ projects building DApps and protocols on the network. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam benefits from the shared security of the Polkadot Relay Chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot. Learn more: https://moonbeam.network/.
