Livepeer (LPT)

Livepeer

Total supply	11,198,133 LPT

Basics

• Started in / Announced on:
• Mainnet release:
• Based in:

• Open Source Video Infrastructure Services, Built On The Ethereum Blockchain.
• From this post by Token Tuesdays (29-1-2020):

"Livepeer, the decentralized live video streaming platform, allows anyone to become an orchestrator and perform video broadcasting work on the network, or delegate LPT tokens with an orchestrator to perform work on the token holder’s behalf.

Orchestrators and their delegates earn newly minted LPT through the protocol’s native inflation as well as earning broadcaster fees in the form of ETH or DAI. When a broadcaster pays fees into the network, both the orchestrators and the delegators earn a portion of those fees as a reward for ensuring a high-quality and secure network. 

Livepeer’s staking rewards are some of the highest in the industry, offering an adjusted return of 18.60%. The protocol recently implemented its Streamflow upgrade as well as launched the token holder site."

• Figment is a staker on Livepeer. From their website (9-3-2020): "Operating active transcoder since June 2018. Livepeer’s original VC investors stake with Figment. We are building staking rewards tracking, thanks to a grant from the Livepeer team. Receive 90% of rewards (10% fee) +  50% of transcoder transaction fees."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found here. Max payout is $2500 (29-6-2020).
• Blockchain Security DB (29-6-2020) shows 1 audit. The latest was in 3-2018.

Bugs/Exploits

• Sam Sun found a bug in their project.

Governance

• From this blog post (9-3-2020):

"In the first 2 years of the Livepeer protocol’s existence, the core development team responsible for the creation of the first version of the protocol also took on the responsibility of upgrading the protocol to better meet the requirements of video streaming applications. At the moment, the governance of the protocol is driven by the core development team as the BDFL (benevolent dictator for life). In order to realize the vision of video streaming public infrastructure that can serve the needs of all video streaming applications around the world, it is crucial for protocol governance to be driven by stakeholders that make the infrastructure possible in the first place.

An ideal governance system will distribute power to stakeholders that contribute to and enable the existence of the protocol allowing them to autonomously change protocol rules and parameters. Designing such a system that serves the needs of stakeholders in every possible future scenario at a single point in time is a herculean task and likely impractical."

However below at the roadmap they tell more about their plans.

• They have active governance participation by CoinFund (30-7-2020).

Treasury

• From Our Network (12-3-2024):

"The Livepeer community treasury hit an all-time high this month accumulating 112,101 LPT tokens."

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: started out on Ethereum but moved to Arbitrum (15-2-2022).

How it works

• From Decrypt (5-1-2022):

"Livepeer is building peer-to-peer infrastructure that interacts through a marketplace, where Ethereum is used to coordinate the entire process and settle the payments."

Staking

• From a commissioned Messari report (4-2024):

"LPT staking rewards grew 123% QoQ in USD terms. The 18% QoQ growth in LPT terms came as LPT issuance reached its highest level since the Arbitrum migration in Q1’22. This increase in LPT issuance corresponded to the staking participation rate decreasing to 43%, below the 50% equilibrium threshold. The high level of staking rewards relative to fees earned via transcoding indicates that the Livepeer node operators rely heavily on staking rewards to sustain their day-to-day operations and offer competitive transcoding prices."

Roadmap

• It plans to harness its massive network of GPUs to be a key infrastructure player in AI computing (13-3-2024).
• From this blog post (9-3-2020), for the full detail check the extensive post itself:

"1. Decentralization of Knowledge, LIPs and Polling

While at this stage stakeholders will still depend on the core developers to execute protocol changes and to safeguard user value if a protocol bug is discovered, these tools, processes and norms will help stakeholders better understand why and how a decision was made thereby creating more transparency and holding core developers more accountable to other stakeholders.

2. Extensible Governance System

The motivation behind this milestone is not to immediately implement a sophisticated binding voting system, but rather to establish the technical foundation that allows for a variety of sophisticated binding voting systems to be implemented in the future.

3. Binding Voting System

This milestone will enable stakeholders to coordinate changes to the protocol without any special privileges afforded to the core developers. There is a wide design space for binding voting systems. Some interesting areas of exploration include:

4. Future

The previous milestone will be the first time when stakeholders will be able to have full autonomous control over changes to the protocol smart contracts. However, the system deployed as a part of the previous milestone will likely still need to change over time. There are a number of interesting mechanisms to explore such as futarchy and quadratic voting. All of these mechanisms will be possible to experiment with and it will be up to the stakeholders to decide which ones best suit the governance needs of the protocol."

Revenue

• Staking rewards due to issuance went up to its highest level ever, however real revenue has been within the $67-97k range for over a year now (16-4-2024).
• From a commissioned Messari report (6-10-2023):

"As a result of increased usage, Livepeer’s demand-side revenue increased 34% QoQ in USD terms (up 43% in ETH terms). To put this in perspective, Livepeer has been one of the largest revenue contributors to the DePIN sector on a consistent basis and has managed to accrue steady demand-side revenue throughout the past quarters."

Usage

• From Our Network (12-3-2024):

"Livepeer powers more than 3M minutes of video processing/week and 3M hours of streaming/month, from web3 social apps like Lens or Unlonely, to Skrillex concerts, to Premier League soccer. Users can stream up to 4k in resolution to a global audience with all popular streaming protocols, at low latency."

• From Decrypt (5-1-2022):

"According to the company, there are already over 70,000 GPUs in the Livepeer network, which provides enough aggregated power to encode all video streaming through Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook combined."

• From Our Network (5-6-2021):

"The number of minutes of input video streamed through the Livepeer network has grown to over 1,000,000 minutes/week, up from about 400,000 in March."

• From Our Network #51 (18-12-2020):

"December is already the highest usage month to date on the Livepeer video infrastructure network, with over 280,000 minutes of video streamed, over $2500 of fees paid by broadcasters to node operators, and over 100,000 LPT distributed to token holding network participants through staking and node operations through the first 15 days."

Competition

• From Our Network (12-3-2024):

"Livepeer is 80% cheaper than traditional cloud services for video streaming without compromising quality and scalability. In the last 2 months, despite a growing number of streamed minutes, the network's transcoding cost dropped from ~$0.12/hour to ~$0.10/hour due to market competition."

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Doug Petkanics, founder & CEO
• Raffi Sapire, Director of Operations
• Eric Tang, founder & CTO
• Joe West, technical Advisor
• Has 32 employees (5-1-2022)

Funding

• From Decrypt (5-1-2022):

"Raised $20 million in funding in its Series B expansion. Livepeer announced its initial $20 million Series B in July 2021. The round was led by Digital Currency Group (DCG) with participation from previous investor Northzone, as well as Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, Mike Dudas' 6th Man Ventures, and Warburg Serres. With the new funding, the company has raised a total of $48 million. New investors in this round include financier Alan Howard and investment firm Tiger Global, with participation from existing backers. The new round of financing also follows the acquisition of MistServer, the flexible content delivery technology which expanded Livepeer offerings to enable developers to build cost-effective and scalable streaming applications targeting such areas as entertainment, events, gaming, and eCommerce."

• Is part of the portfolio of MultiCoin (25-11-2020).

Partners

• From Our Network #51 (18-12-2020):

"On the web3 side, the file.video integration between Filecoin and Livepeer serves as a template for a decentralized Youtube, and allows users to upload videos to be ingested and transcoded by Livepeer, and stored on Filecoin for long term access and playback."

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