Moonbeam’s companion network, Moonriver, was developed to deliver an immutable, incentivized Kusama canary network. Essentially, that means that when new code is created, it first ships to Moonriver where it’s stress-tested to see if the network can withstand the bandwidth under 100% real economic situations. Once the code is proven to be strong enough, that exact same code transitions to Polkadot. Moonriver is community-focused because MOVR holders are given a more extensive portion of the network compared to some of the other leading blockchains. 

As far as history is concerned, Moonriver first deployed in June 2021 as one of Kusama’s parachains. Moonriver was intended to feature an increase of speed and lower the amount of editing from when blockchain code is tested to when the code is deployed. Moonriver is Kusama’s most widely adopted parachain featuring integrations with over 2,000 ERC-20 tokens. Additionally, the platform also features yield farming, APY boosts, and token distribution events, and crowd loans. It has received more contributions for crowdloans than any other parachain.