To optimize your delegation, you’ll want to choose a collator with a lower total bond amount. By choosing a collator with a lower total bond, your delegation amount represents a larger percentage of that collator’s total amount staked, and thus you’ll earn a slightly higher reward. The collator list on the staking app is sorted by default from collators with the lowest total amount staked at the top to ones with the highest at the bottom. However, you should exercise caution when delegating to the collators with the lowest amounts of total stake, because they’re most at risk of being bumped to the waiting pool.

These are the most important things to look out for:

• Low total amount staked to the collator. You want to maximize the share of the rewards that are paid out to you, so it’s favorable to choose a collator with a low total stake. However, you also need to be mindful that…
• Collator is not too low in the active set. Collators on the verge of falling out of the active set carry more risk: if their total stake amount is exceeded by another collator and they fall out of the set, all delegators will stop earning rewards.
• High block production rate. Since rewards are paid out based on the blocks they produce each round, you’ll want a high-performing collator with a greater chance of producing more blocks.
• Reputable collator. If they have an identity set, use that. Look them up on Discord or generally on the web. Do they provide infrastructure on other networks? Do they have a history of high-performing collator and validator services? You can learn a lot this way.

The main purpose of a collator is to produce blocks and support block liveness on the network. From there, collators offer up blocks to validators on the relay chain for finalization.

Collators gather transactions into blocks and submit these blocks to the relay chain (On Kusama). Without a decentralized set of collators, no new blocks would be created, and the censorship resistance properties of the network would be in question. Validators of the Relay Chain ensure the validity of the submitted blocks and include them in relay chain blocks to ensure finality.

You can currently earn ~ X % on your $MOVR

Use the Moonriver Staking Calculator to play with metrics and predict your earnings under certain network conditions.

There is no significant risk when delegating $MOVR.

Please note that there is a no risk of slashing on the Moonbeam network. Moonbeam has no slashing, so you’ll never lose your original delegation amount. If your chosen collator stops producing blocks, you won’t earn rewards for the period they’re offline.

Additionally, please consider that there is a 2 day unbonding period before you can access your delegated funds and transfer them.

The basic principle behind the Moonriver network is to function as a smart contract platform that provides a one-stop hub to its users for redeploying Ethereum Dapps without needing to configure them specifically for this network. It is built on the Kusama blockchain which acts as a Canary network to Polkadot. Many people stop there and think of it as a “Testnet” or “Beta” network for Polkadot, but it has a thriving community that is building on the chain. Given that Kusama uses the same code as Polkadot, the capabilities of the network are limitless. Kusama has developed into an independent ecosystem that has a fully-fledged committed community with teams building incredible projects on the network.

Existing smart contract platforms are designed to service the users and assets on a single, specific chain. By providing cross-chain smart contract functionality, Moonriver allows developers to shift existing workloads and logic to Moonriver and extend the reach of their applications to new users and assets on other chains.

Moonriver’s cross-chain integration is accomplished by becoming a parachain on the Kusama network. The Kusama network provides integration and connectivity between parachains that are connected to the network and to other non-Kusama-based chains, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, via bridges.

To see a detailed analysis on the difference between Moonbeam and Moonriver, watch this video from one of our research analysts.

• Decentralized and Permissionless , providing a base requirement for censorship resistance and support for many existing and future DApp use cases.
• Contains a Full EVM Implementation , enabling Solidity-based smart contracts to be migrated with minimal change and with expected execution results.
• Implements the Web3 RPC API so that existing DApp front-ends can be migrated with minimal change required, and so existing Ethereum-based tools, such as Truffle, Remix, and MetaMask, can be used without modification against Moonriver.
• Compatible with the Substrate Ecosystem Toolset , including block explorers, front-end development libraries, and wallets, allowing developers and users to use the right tool for what they are trying to accomplish.
• Native Cross-Chain Integration via the Kusama network and via token bridges, which allows for token movement, state visibility, and message passing with Ethereum and other chains.
• On-Chain Governance to allow stakeholders to quickly and forklessly evolve the base protocol according to developer and community needs.