Moonbeam is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain operating as a parachain on the Polkadot network. EVM compatibility enables Ethereum-based applications to deploy on Moonbeam.
The network provides developers with features such as deploying Solidity smart contracts, Web3-compatible APIs, oracle data, and Ethereum network bridging.

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

Moonbeam consists of the following key components:
Polkadot: Polkadot aims to facilitate cross-chain communication and interoperability. Moonbeam is the Polkadot ecosystem version of Moonriver (MOVR) from the Kusama ecosystem.
Parachains: Parachains are independent blockchains (shards) that can connect to Polkadot.
Crowdloans: This is how projects raise funds for a parachain slot on the Polkadot network. Users temporarily lock their DOTs in exchange for project team rewards, typically in the form of native project tokens.
Slot Auctions: Projects wishing to operate as a parachain on Polkadot must win a slot in a parachain auction. Moonbeam won its slot in the second parachain auction, commencing on December 17, 2021, for 96 weeks.
The project raised ~36MM DOT tokens from approximately 200K contributors during its crowdloan for the Moonbeam parachain slot auction.