What is Livepeer?

Livepeer (LPT) is a decentralised network protocol and infrastructure for live video streaming. It entered the market with the intention of enabling decentralised app (dapp) developers, entertainers, and streaming service providers to open future communications, economic opportunities, and entertainment for society. The platform blends an Ethereum-based protocol and a network of video nodes to perform this objective.

Its native token, LPT, is an ERC-20 token that’s used for protocol incentivisation, staking, governance, and dual mining.

A brief history of Livepeer

The Livepeer project was launched in March 2017 by entrepreneurs Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang, and has been live on Ethereum’s mainnet since May 2018. Its goal is to deliver a live video streaming network protocol that is fully decentralised, less expensive, and highly scalable, without a single point of failure.

Initially, streaming use was concentrated on crypto community-oriented events like DevCon, Ethereum core dev calls, and various meetings and events. Over the years, a succession of network improvements have happened, including Streamflow in January 2020, which dramatically accelerated the capacity and performance potential of the network. Enabling cryptocurrency miners to leverage the chips on their existing Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for transcoding allows for scaled network utilisation at a cheaper cost. Individual event streams have given way to larger-scale applications that use Livepeer for tens or hundreds of concurrent video feeds.

The vision for Livepeer is to be the primary infrastructure for the growing US$70 billion streaming industry, representing significant infrastructure savings for those applications that stream at scale. It also combines with other Web3 protocols to serve as critical infrastructure for the next wave of crypto-enabled ownership economy applications.

Token holders in Livepeer stake LPT in order to delegate or operate nodes. They contribute their computation and bandwidth to video transcoding, while earning the fees that platforms pay in ETH in order to utilise the video infrastructure for their applications.

The initial distribution was completed on 2 October 2018, with all 6,343,700 genesis LPT distributed. The founders and early team retained 1,235,000 LPT (vesting over 36 months), with 1,900,000 LPT sold in a pre-sale (vesting over 18 months). A further 500,000 LPT was placed in a long-term development fund, and 21,300 LPT was distributed as a grant to a couple of early advisors and contributors.

In July 2021, Livepeer closed its US$20 million Series B in a round led by DCG, with participation from Northzone, Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, Mike Dudas’ 6th Man Ventures, and Warberg Serres. In January 2022, the network raised a further US$20 million Series B-1. New investors in this round included Alan Howard and Tiger Global.

How Livepeer works

To deliver lightning-fast streaming and safe broadcasting capabilities, Livepeer aggregates video transcoding tasks throughout its decentralised network of nodes. The platform's technical structure enables developers to cut the expenses of hosting streaming video in applications and more.

Video nodes are a key component of Livepeer. These nodes are charged for transcoding video with the help of their GPUs. For their contributions, video nodes are rewarded with ETH and LPT tokens. The bigger the video processed, the more incentives received. This strategy allows for more scalability and minimises centralised systems’ ‘last mile’ concerns.

LPT is an Ethereum blockchain-based ERC-20 token. It allows users to engage with all of Livepeer's features and services. Users may utilise LPT to transfer data all over the world, and may also obtain LPT prizes and stake the token. The developers have established a maximum amount of 22,906,951 LPT tokens for issue over the course of the project. LPT token pools may be found on Uniswap and other ERC-20-compliant decentralised exchanges (DEXs).

What is Livepeer used for?

The platform is intended to compete with today’s major centralised video hosting platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure. Livepeer aims to bring a more free and democratic option to the market by providing a decentralised infrastructure for developers that is both safe and responsive.

Through the power of decentralisation, Livepeer allows users to have their views heard, and may give high-quality streaming services at a low cost. As more nodes join the Livepeer network, it becomes quicker, and every node contributes to the network's greater decentralisation, making it more secure.