Moonriver is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain operating as a parachain on the Kusama network. EVM compatibility enables Ethereum-based applications to deploy on Moonriver.
The network provides developers with features such as deploying Solidity smart contracts, Web3-compatible APIs, oracle data, and Ethereum network bridging. MOVR is the functional and governance token of the platform, which can be used for network governance, paying transaction fees, earning rewards through providing liquidity and staking.

MOVR is the functional and governance token of Moonriver, with the following use cases:
Transaction Fees: Users can pay transaction fees and execute smart contracts using MOVR.
Staking: Users can stake MOVR to become validators or delegate, participate in network consensus, and receive MOVR rewards.
Governance: MOVR token holders can nominate council members and participate in voting on the network.
Liquidity Mining: Providing liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEXs) built on the Moonriver blockchain (such as Solarbeam) to earn a portion of the exchanges fees.

Moonriver consists of the following main components:
Kusama: Kusama serves as a public test environment (Canary network) before projects launch on Polkadot. Moonriver is the Kusama ecosystem version of Moonbeam (GLMR) in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Parachains: Parachains are independent blockchains (shards) that can connect to Kusama.
Crowdloans: This is the method by which projects raise funds for a parachain slot on the Kusama network. Users temporarily lock their KSM in exchange for rewards from the project team, typically in the form of the projects native token.
Slot Auctions: Projects wishing to operate as a parachain on Kusama must win a slot in a parachain auction. Moonriver won its slot in the second parachain auction through a crowdloan, securing a 48-week Kusama parachain lease (from June 29, 2021, to May 13, 2022).

The project raised approximately 47,000 KSM tokens from around 23,700 contributors during the Moonriver crowdloan for the Kusama parachain slot auction.