• The Livepeer network serves as the video infrastructure for developers to power their live streaming applications. Video streaming represents over 80% of the bandwidth used on the internet, and traditional video infrastructures present high cost barriers for startups and developers to build new streaming platforms.

  • Livepeer’s open Web 3.0 video infrastructure provides a platform for the creator economy of live streaming apps to exist, which would otherwise run within the ad-supported models of the traditional tech platforms.

  • LPT is Livepeer’s native work token and is used in the following functions:

    • Protocol Incentivization: Users can earn LPT tokens as rewards when they run a node or delegate towards node operators on the platform. Users also earn the fees paid in ETH through staking and node operation, both of which require LPT.

    • Staking: Users may stake LPT tokens to secure the network from attacks, and earn staking rewards in LPT tokens.

    • Governance: LPT token holders can propose and vote on network governance decisions.

    • Dual Mining: Users who stake to run Livepeer nodes that are backed by GPUs, can also concurrently mine other GPU-based cryptocurrencies without disrupting their transcoding.

  • The protocol consists of the following major components working in conjunction:

    • Orchestrator nodes: A user-operated network of nodes that compete for video transcoding jobs to distribute to transcode nodes, negotiate prices with broadcast nodes, and interact with the protocol to secure and distribute the daily inflationary LPT. These are much like validator nodes in other protocols.

    • Transcoder nodes: Typically GPU based hardware that specialize in video encoding. These are typically, but not always, run by the same operators who are running Orchestrator nodes, and these nodes simply encode video and make it available to the Orchestrators.

    • Broadcast Nodes: Users of the Livepeer network that are looking to build video streaming apps run Broadcast nodes to ingest their video and outsource the video encoding work to the Orchestrator network. These nodes deposit ETH and pay to the Orchestrators that are contracted to do the jobs.

    • Explorer Dashboard: A tool for token holders to stake tokens toward node operators, and participate in governance decisions.

  • Of the 10,000,000 LPT at genesis, 6,343,700 LPT were distributed to the community via an open MerkleMine algorithm, 1,235,000 LPT was retained by the founders and early team (vesting over 36 months), 1,900,000 LPT was sold in a pre-sale (vesting over 18 months), 500,000 LPT was put in a long term development fund and 21,300 was issued as a grant to a couple of early advisors and contributors.

  • The project raised 3.85M USD from two rounds of pre-sale purchases where 9% of the genesis token supply of 10MM LPT was sold at 0.94 USD/LPT and 10% of the genesis token supply of 10MM LPT was sold at 3 USD/LPT.

  • The project also raised 8.15M USD in a subsequent equity round.

  • As at May 28th, 2021, the total supply of LPT is 23,682,044 and the circulating supply is 100%.