Many things changed since the start of 2022, back when we announced our project and bootstrapped our initial community.

One of the many casualties of the 2022 bear market was the demand for block space. With Ethereum fees back at a reasonable level, the value proposition of multi-chain or cross-chain environments diminishes significantly.

The results of this process are already visible. We’ve seen major consolidation across the DeFi space, to the point that it’s difficult to find meaningful organic activity outside of the top-4 of blockchains by TVL.

Unfortunately, this means that there is little business sense in making Moonbeam our immediate next destination. Furthermore, Moonbeam ecosystem incentives are currently heavily skewed in favor of one DEX, making it difficult for us to enter the market until this situation changes.

This isn’t a goodbye: circumstances could once again change, and we expect to launch on Moonbeam as soon as we’re settled elsewhere. We hope the Moonbeam ecosystem will prevail, and appreciate the community support so far!

Moonriver will also remain our home and the place where we deploy upgrades first. We fully believe that launching on a smaller canary network is extremely valuable for any project developing new DeFi primitives.

As we already anticipated, plans for a ZRN token were put on hold due to the market situation.

So, in our immediate roadmap we expect to deploy on BNB Chain (formerly known as BSC) and Arbitrum a little bit later.

Why BNB Chain?

BNB Chain is quite simply the most active blockchain by Daily Active Users. New crypto users will often be onboarded to DeFi through BNB Chain first, thanks to Binance’s massive outreach campaigns.

While DeFi is often a game of whales on most other chains, on BNB Chain it’s much less so. This aligns with our goal of empowering regular people through DeFi.

BNB Chain is fast, cheap and supports a significant amount of liquidity. It has a rich set of native projects, but few next generation DEXs that go beyond the basic design of Uniswap V2.

What’s the plan?

We expect to launch the BNB Chain deployment on Thursday, February 23. The deployment will go live with a few native farms for ZRG, BNB and USDT, and gradually include a wider selection of tokens as we launch pools with partner projects within the ecosystem.

The ZRG token will be transferable from Moonriver to BNB (and back) thanks to our partners Multichain.

Our goal for this deployment is to become the home of exciting projects on BNB, offering an easy way to generate liquidity for popular projects.

We’re super excited to show our system to the world, and BNB Chain will help us reach the largest number of users possible!

What’s next?

We’re committed to launch on Arbitrum as well. The chain is home to a renaissance of DeFi activity, and protocols across the whole space are flocking to it. 

Arbitrum also has a good number of DEXs competing for attention. This is good: it means that there is no established DEX yet. The opportunity to be the best DEX on Arbitrum is still out there, especially since most other protocols are Uniswap V2 forks.

But the cutthroat environment means that we need to be excellently prepared and find the perfect moment to take our shot. We’ll offer more updates on this front — for now our focus is on BNB.

We’re also cooking up very interesting things for our farming and swapping systems, which we’ll reveal a little bit later.

Subscribe below to never miss any of our updates!