Polkassembly Governance and MetaMask Integration is Live on Moonriver, Coming Soon to Moonbeam

Singapore – March 18, 2022 – Moonbeam, the fully Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on Polkadot, has announced the completion of an integration with Polkassembly, allowing token holders to learn about open referenda and vote in on-chain governance using their MetaMask wallet. Through Polkassembly, users can directly participate in governance and discussion for Moonriver, and soon, Moonbeam. This integration is yet another way that Moonbeam broadens accessibility to features that are unique to Polkadot through its unmatched Ethereum compatibility and support.

The Polkassembly integration was made possible by the introduction of a new democracy precompile for Moonbeam, which allows technologies that leverage EVM-based Web3 RPCs, like MetaMask, to reference and interact with Substrate-based democracy actions. The precompile was introduced to Moonriver in February 2022 as part of Runtime 1200 and will be added to Moonbeam shortly as part of Runtime 1400. This functionality, coupled with new MetaMask extension support from the Polkassembly team, makes it easy for holders of MOVR and GLMR governance tokens to interact with referenda from the Polkassembly DApp without needing to switch wallets.

There are two open proposals for a new XCM connection to Bifrost, on which MOVR token holders can vote: #74 to open a bidirectional HRMP channel between the two parachains, and #73 to register xcBNC as an asset on Moonriver.

Polkassembly is a platform to discuss and vote on governance proposals, motions and referenda. This unified platform democratizes governance for Substrate chains to enable communities to make decisions about the future of their protocol. It also provides a voting experience that allows networks to further decentralize their governance by providing a forum space for token holders to offer opinions and lobby for important changes that matter to them. Users can propose, explain, discuss, and vote on network decisions. Users vote by locking tokens for a transparent lock period and unlock tokens with expired democracy locks from the settings page.

Participating in on-chain governance is an important aspect of Web3, as it contributes to both decentralized decision-making and increases the transparency of protocol changes. The combination of Polkassembly and the democracy precompile vastly reduces the friction for network participants to engage in on-chain decision making. Using Polkassembly, token holders can get involved with various aspects of network management including, but not limited to, code upgrades, changes to the values for key parameters and even alterations to the governance system itself to build community and maintain the ecosystem.

About the Moonbeam Network

Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. Like Moonriver, its sister parachain on Kusama, Moonbeam is expected to accumulate developer and user activity from the 80+ projects building DApps and protocols on the network. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam benefits from the shared security of the Polkadot Relay Chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot. Learn more: https://moonbeam.network/.