Livepeer (LPT)
What Is Livepeer (LPT)?
Launched in 2017, Livepeer is the first live video streaming network protocol that is fully decentralized. The platform aims to become a viable blockchain-based, economically efficient alternative to centralized broadcasting solutions for all new and existing broadcaster companies.
As stated in the official Livepeer whitepaper, the live video streaming and broadcasting industry is growing at a rapid pace, and the company is looking to ride this wave and introduce decentralization to the environment. Livepeer aims to streamline the broadcasting process by allowing producers to submit their work on the platform, taking care of reformatting and distributing the content to users and streaming platforms.
Who Are the Founders of Livepeer?
Livepeer is an open-source protocol, which means that developers can freely contribute to the underlying code on GitHub. Livepeer Inc is the legal entity behind the Livepeer platform. Livepeer Inc was founded by Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang.
Doug Petkanics graduated with a degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Since then, he has been an integral part of several big names like Groupon and Wildcard. In 2006, he joined Accenture as an analyst, and in 2010 he co-founded Hyperpublic, which Groupon later acquired. In 2013, Petkanics co-founded Wildcard, a publishing platform, and web browser. Since 2016, he has been at the center of development for Livepeer.
Eric Tang graduated with a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2008, he joined Next Jump as a software developer, and in 2010 he became a product manager for Clickable. In 2010, he teamed up with Doug Petkanics and co-founded Hyperpublic. Since then, the duo has worked together on Wildcard and later on Livepeer.
History of Livepeer.
The Livepeer project was introduced in March 2017 by founders Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang. Live streaming services, such as YouTube and Twitch have seen tremendous growth in popularity in recent years. Broadcasting or building a streaming application however can be very expensive, as a result of payments to centralized transcoding and distribution companies. Livepeer provides the infrastructure service layer for decentralized live video streaming. In doing so, Livepeer aims to provide a cheaper, more scalable, open solution that is more resilient without single points of failure. Token holders in Livepeer stake LPT in order to delegate or run nodes, and contribute their compute and bandwidth to video transcoding, while earning the fees paid in ETH, that platforms pay to use this video infrastructure for their applications.
The Livepeer network launched on Ethereum's Mainnet in May 2018. Initial streaming usage focused on crypto community-focused events such as DevCon, the Ethereum core dev calls, numerous meetups, and events. A series of network upgrades occurred over the years, with the largest, Streamflow in January 2020, enabling scaled usage of the network at lower cost. Usage has shifted from individual event streams to more large scale applications that leverage Livepeer for 10's or 100's of concurrent streams of video. The vision for Livepeer is to be the primary infrastructure for the growing $70B streaming industry, representing significant infrastructure savings for those applications that stream at scale, while also combining with other web3 protocols to serve as critical infrastructure for the coming wave of crypto-enabled ownership economy applications.
Livepeer focuses on providing value to several stakeholder groups:
- GPU Cryptocurrency Miners - Existing GPU miner can be utilized to earn additional revenue by transcoding video on Livepeer, without disrupting mining income, because existing GPUs have video encoding chips that sit there idle while hashing.
- Video streaming platforms - Reduce transcoding costs from the $3/stream/hour that cloud providers charge to 10-100x cheaper on the open Livepeer network. Livepeer aims to provide scalable streaming, without requiring extensive devops work.
- Token holding participants - Provide security and QA on the network through staking and earn a portion of the network income and inflationary token rewards in exchange for the provided work.
What Makes Livepeer Unique?
Livepeer is a unique project because it aims to revolutionize the broadcasting industry by employing the powers of blockchain technology. The open-source platform allows users and developers to participate in the management and improvement of the platform freely. The growing capabilities of digital cameras for producing high-quality video content drive the development of the broadcasting industry, and Livepeer aims to further boost this process by allowing users to benefit from decentralized computing power and crypto-economic incentives for bootstrapping and participation.
Livepeer is becoming a leading industry platform, as it allows users to participate in numerous ways. The platform offers opportunities for pay-as-you-go content consumption, auto-scaling social video services, uncensorable live journalism, and video-enabled DApps. Livepeer is transforming the live video streaming process and is on the road to becoming an industry leader.
How Is the Livepeer Network Secured?
As Livepeer is built on the Ethereum blockchain, the platform utilizes a modified version of a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. In a DPoS mechanism, there is no mining at all. Instead, the validation of new blocks on the blockchain happens based on the number of coins staked.
This is what differentiates Livepeer from consensus mechanisms as the one Bitcoin uses. While Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism requires a large amount of electrical and computing power, the DPoS systems are more ecologically conscious and easily scalable. Not only that, LIvepeer benefits from the extensive DApp universe already established by the Ethereum blockchain, which further boosts the usability of the network.
Tags:
Cryptocurrency