TLDR;
- In February 2024, the Moonriver community voted in favor of joining the Axelar Amplifier program with a go-live target in Q2 of 2024
- In April 2024, additional grants were announced to revitalize the Defi Ecosystem on Moonriver, which would make use of Axelar to bridge liquidity from other ecosystems
- Due to delays in the development of the Amplifier protocol, the onboarding timeline for Moonriver was pushed to Q4 of 2024 and then later moved again to some point in 2025
- Interop Labs have offered to return the 100K fee for joining the Amplifier program but remains committed to assisting with the Moonriver deployment when permissionless EVM onboarding is finally released
- The hope is that Moonriver will be onboarded in late Q2 of 2025
- In the meantime, a native bridge is being developed to connect the Moonriver and Moonbeam ecosystems as a backup route
Details
Just over a year ago, the Moonriver community voted to fund participation in the Axelar Amplifier Pilot program (see forum post). The goal of this program was to have the Axelar Amplifier network deployed to Moonriver toward the end of Q2.
Among the costs for participating in the program was $100K to join the Amplifier Pilot Program. The purpose of this program was to provide technical support for teams building permissionless connections to the Axelar network leveraging the Amplifier protocol in early development.
In April of 2024, a discussion in the forum was started in order to develop a vision for Moonriver’s DeFi Strategy including grants to develop a Concentrated Liquidity (V3) AMM and to build liquidity. The idea was to launch these following the successful onboarding of Moonriver to Axelar’s network so that assets from other Ecosystems could be bridged to Moonriver’s Defi venues.
In September 2024, Axelar provided an update letting the Moonbeam Foundation know that the release of Amplifier incurred significant delays due to the complexity of this major architectural change to the Axelar network. In particular, permissionless and parallelizable chain onboarding (required for Moonriver) was deferred to a subsequent phase in 2025.
Interop Labs has assured the Moonbeam Foundation that it remains committed to assisting with the Moonriver integration once permissionless EVM onboarding is available. At the same time, Interop Labs also recognizes that these significant delays have negatively affected the Moonriver ecosystem and, therefore, has offered to refund the original $100k fee to the Moonbeam Foundation that was paid to enter the Amplifier Pilot Program. Those funds will be repurposed to support ongoing operational costs related to Moonriver’s participation in the Amplifier protocol or for grants related to Defi projects deploying to Moonriver.
On the Moonriver side, the Moonbeam Foundation has spent considerable time building out the needed test infrastructure and getting familiar with the Amplifier protocol to be ready to go once permissionless EVM onboarding is released. The hope is that this will come mid to late Q2 and that the onboarding of Moonriver will occur shortly thereafter. Moonbeam Foundation remains confident that Axelar integration will bring significant long-term benefits to the Moonriver ecosystem.
In the meantime, development has begun on a trustless, native bridge between Moonbeam and Moonriver based on the Polkadot-SDK bridging solution (see the Bridges subfolder in the Polkadot SDK repo), providing an alternate and backup route to move liquidity between ecosystems. The target is to have this native bridge live following the deployment of RT3700 to Moonbeam in June.