The Highly Anticipated Launch Begins, Providing Developers with EVM Access to Polkadot
Singapore – December 17, 2021 – Moonbeam, the Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on Polkadot, has officially begun its launch process to become a fully operational parachain. This initial stage, nicknamed Phase 0, is the first in a multi-step process that will conclude when Moonbeam is fully live on Polkadot, expected in January 2022. As one of the first smart contract platforms on Polkadot, Moonbeam is expected to bring significant traction with its powerful ecosystem of infrastructure, DApps, and protocols.
The initiation of the launch process follows a successful crowdloan campaign hosted by the Moonbeam Foundation, which received over 35M DOT (~$1.4 billion USD as of the crowdloan completion on November 24) contributed by over 200,000 supporters around the globe. Moonbeam’s crowdloan had both the largest number of contributors and the highest amount of DOT received by any parachain.
Moonbeam’s three-phase launch process is designed to gradually roll out functionality to ensure network stability and safety, and is expected to take 3 to 4 weeks to complete. Collators play a critical role in this process, as well as in the decentralization and performance of the Moonbeam network overall. The initial set of third-party collators have been chosen due to their high performance during a series of performance tests on Moonbase Alpha.
The Moonbeam network is currently in Phase 0, which is centralized. In Phase 1, block production will shift to a decentralized set of collators. In Phase 2 (the final phase), EVM and balance transfers will be enabled, and users will have full functionality of the network. Full details for the Moonbeam launch process are below:
Phase 0 | Centralized | December 17, 2021
- Minimal requirement for centralized block production
- 4 collators managed by the Moonbeam Foundation and 4 collators managed by PureStake
- Staking only controlled by the Moonbeam Foundation
- Transfers and EVM disabled
- Block production eligibility set to 20% (2 collators per block)
- Governance is enabled but limited to the Moonbeam Foundation
Phase 1 | Decentralization | December 21, 2021
- Expanding active collator set by 24 external collators (total of 32) for decentralization
- Collators staking done by the Foundation
- Authorship eligibility set to 1% (1 collator per block)
Phase 2 | Full Launch:
- Increase active collator set by 16 for a total of 48 collators.
- Sudo access is removed
- Balance transfers and EVM are enabled
- Initialization of the crowdloan rewards
For the latest news regarding the launch process, visit moonbeam.network.
Fifteen percent of the genesis supply of GLMR tokens are allocated as crowdloan rewards, which represent 150 million GLMR tokens. These tokens will be given to crowdloan contributors based on the amount of DOT they contributed to the campaign. Of those rewards, 30% will be distributed as soon as transfers are enabled (in January 2022), and the remaining 70% will be distributed over 96 weeks (the duration of the parachain lease).
Individuals who participated in the Take Flight event through the Moonbeam Foundation can expect their tokens to be available 40 days after Full Launch (Phase 2) which will be sometime in February 2022.
For crowdloan information and token distribution information, visit moonbeam.foundation.
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. Following Moonriver’s tremendous success on Kusama as the most active deployment destination for over 80 DApps, 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/.
