Moonbeam News
Moonbeam Goes Live on Polkadot, Becomes its First Fully Operational Parachain
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Polkadot’s Moonbeam — the parachain smart contract platform that is compatible with Ethereum — recently managed to complete its pre-launch process, and finally go live within the Polkadot ecosystem. The launch was announced earlier this week, on Tuesday, December 11th.
The launch also represents a huge milestone for Polkadot itself, as Moonbeam is now the first fully operational parachain on Polkadot’s blockchain. With its release, the Moonbeam protocol will provide a way for over 80 different projects in its ecosystem, which will now be able to be deployed.
Moonbeam’s launch will also bring a number of innovations, including new integrations, users, activities, and more — all of which will help boost the Polkadot ecosystem and help its network grow.
Back in October 2021, Moonbeam also managed to win Polkadot Parachain Auction — which was the second one that was ever held. Now, according to the announcement, Moonbeam removed the superuser key, Sudo, during the first phase of the launch. In doing so, it started the process that will grant control of the network to its community of token holders, thus triggering full decentralization.
Details about the Moonbeam launch
Apart from everything mentioned above, it is worth noting that Moonbeam also enabled balance transfers, as well as EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) within its platform. The balance transfer is particularly important for investors, as it will allow them to engage in staking. In other words, users will be able to start earning rewards from the crowdloan, and receive passive income.
Following this change, the project’s community of token holders will now be in charge of overseeing the chain through the governance system. Another noteworthy change is the fact that the active set of collectors is now higher, sitting at 48.
After the launch, GLMR token holders gained the ability to stake alongside the collectors, serve as active network members by participating in an on-chain governance system, and claim crowdloan rewards. Speaking of crowdloan rewards, approximately 30% of them — or around 45 million GLMR — was distributed as soon as the project got launched on Polkadot. The distribution was directly dependant on the percentage of the contribution, as the announcement pointed out.
The other 70%, which is around 105 million GLMR, will be linearly vested over the 96-week parachain lease period. This started in mid-December, and we are already three weeks in. What this means is that there are three weeks of vested rewards that can be claimed by the contributors right now.
Finally, Moonbeam used this opportunity to announce that it plans to deploy several new projects dedicated to building up infrastructure. These will arrive over the next few weeks, and they will include things like multisig support, Chainlink oracles, bridges, The Graph, and alike.
With Moonbeam’s parachain launch, this is a big step for Polkadot’s entire network, as the project became the first official, fully functioning parachain, and Polkadot’s entire system is dedicated to launching parachains — not only for increased scalability, but also for achieving interoperability with other chains in the industry. Now, the project made a huge step towards this goal, and the move will provide additional encouragement.
To learn more about this token visit our Investing in Polkadot guide.
