Year in review 2021: Wrapping up a transformative 12 months for Livepeer

By almost any measure, 2021 has been a year of transformation for Livepeer. Previous records were broken, important partnerships were forged, a ton of new features were added, and the Network is primed for a major upgrade — so many high points they can’t all be covered in one post. But here’s a list of the most meaningful ones:

Transcoding records transcended: After a record-breaking climb throughout the year, the Livepeer Network transcoded an all-time high 3.6 million minutes of video during the first week of October, a tenfold increase from the start of 2021. New records were set in the months of September and November, when the network twice hit a new high of 10.5 million monthly minutes transcoded.

Global attention for LPT: The market cap for the Livepeer token now tops $1.1 billion. After hitting a record high of $75.38 on November 11th, LPT is now trading at around $45, a more than 32-fold gain from its opening price on January 1. In recognition of Livepeer’s potential and growing demand from developers, a raft of top digital asset exchanges listed LPT during the year, including Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OKEX, Liquid and, just this month, Huobi. The token was also added to a number of investment indices. Digital asset powerhouse Grayscale created the Livepeer Trust, a security designed to invest passively in LPT, while LPT was also listed in the Index Cooperative’s new Data Economy Index, a chain-agnostic basket of seven Web3 projects investors can buy into via a fungible token (DATA).

A lead role on the Web3 stage: Many commentators have pegged 2021 as the year Web3 came of age, and Livepeer has been cited by many as an example of that maturity. Livepeer and five other infrastructure peers were included as inaugural listings on The Web3 Index, a brand-new benchmark and the first to rate protocols based on fundamentals such as aggregate usage fees rather than on more subjective measures such as market price. Livepeer was honored to be included in the launch of an index with closely aligned values.

Strategic alliances and partnerships: A co-mining pilot with Filecoin, announced in March, was designed to allow miners to power infrastructure for both networks, creating economic incentives for users and offering new opportunities for dApps to capitalize on the co-location of video transcoding and data storage. And as of this summer, Livepeer has been running live using The Graph’s main network as one of the indexing protocol’s initial migration partners.

Ground-breaking innovation, support for Web3 developers: Livepeer supported a wellspring of Web3 innovation by sponsoring bounties and hosting workshops at major ETHGlobal hackathons throughout 2021. Hacking teams leveraging Livepeer technology generated truly transformative ideas, focusing in particular on how creators can use video NFTs to generate revenue. Speaking of NFTs, Livepeer and Glass co-hosted COLLIDE, the first-ever concert featuring real-time video NFT minting on the sidelines of NYC.NFT. COLLIDE is the first of many groundbreaking events to come. So watch this space!

Designing and preparing the Confluence update: In September, the core Livepeer team published a preliminary proposal for “Confluence”, a protocol upgrade that will migrate the Livepeer Network to Arbitrum, a leading L2 scaling solution. The primary goal of this upgrade is to help orchestrators maximize profits by running on Arbitrum, which offers lower fees and faster transactions than mainnet. Confluence also lays the groundwork for many new opportunities for delegators in the future. The Livepeer team is currently seeking community feedback on the migration design before producing a final draft of the Confluence Livepeer Improvement Proposal, or LIP.

Funds raised to future-proof the network: In August, Livepeer Inc. raised $20 million in a Series B funding round to help ready the network for its next phase of growth, by boosting its reach across multiple blockchains, adding new functionality, and broadening service offerings for broadcasters. Lead investor Digital Currency Group (DCG) was joined by Northzone, Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund, Mike Dudas’s Six Man Ventures, and Warburg Serres. Their endorsement was a welcome vote of confidence in the future of Livepeer and in the transformative power of Web3 decentralization.

Building out the team to support growth: Livepeer Inc. made a number of important additions to the team designed to build brand awareness, thoughtfully manage product development, and facilitate communications both with the outside world and within the community. Proven marketing leader Meredith Tretiak joined as global head of marketing, while Web3 advocate and amateur hacker Shannon Wells came on board with an undertaking to deepen engagement with the community, and Hunter Hillman joined to lead product.

Acquisitions, enhancements, new products for Livepeer.com: A welter of new features raised the game for users of Livepeer.com, the top product on the Livepeer Network.

• In October Livepeer Inc. made its first-ever acquisition with the purchase of the deployable media server MistServer. Adding the wide-ranging capabilities of MistServer to the Livepeer family will ramp up demand for the network, while the addition of top talent from DDVTech B.V. strengthens the core Livepeer team.
• The addition of end-to-end live streaming, which supports not only transcoding but video ingest, content delivery and storage, is enabling developers to build full-scale streaming applications that leverage the network. Other new functionalities came on board as well, including multistreaming, recording, a redesigned dashboard, insights into stream health and webhooks. The reconfigured dashboard now boasts a home page with quick links to features, active stream management, and the lowdown on usage and billing information.
• There were some key additions to the Web3 toolkit as well, including clipping, Transcoding on Demand, and token-gated streams. Coupled with Livepeer’s pioneering work with video NFTs, these enhancements are designed to improve user experience and drive network demand. More importantly, they’re helping creators control their own output and build communities around their content.

Digital trends stimulate demand: Developments in the digital realm helped drive activity on the Livepeer Network during the year and bode well for 2022. Here are just a few:

• The boom in the creator economy showed no sign of flagging. Thirst for live entertainment has prompted new streaming ventures, placing musicians, performers and entertainers in control of their output and opening up new communications channels with audiences. And research suggests the trend towards bespoke streaming, already in evidence before the pandemic, is here to stay. The same certainly seems true of live ecommerce, the immersive blend of entertainment and shopping predicted to account for up to 10–20% of all online sales in the next five years. And what do start-up and niche platforms need to help them compete against entrenched behemoths? High-quality, low-cost decentralized infrastructure networks like Livepeer.
• Growing faith in the potential of Web3 was further bolstered by a rash of incidents that shook faith in Web2: from Facebook’s outage and whistleblower leaks to a massive hacking attack on Twitch that saw sensitive user data released into the world.
• Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) left the fringes and moved onto the main stage, as a growing number of creators explored them as a viable way to establish provenance and earn income for their work. Video NFTs, in particular, look set for major growth as use cases expand past collecting and trading, tapping into the medium’s enormous potential for interactivity, adaptability and deep storytelling.

Setting the stage for a strong 2022: All of this transformative change has prepared the ground for a superb 2022 in the Livepeer ecosystem as this year’s investments in the supply and demand sides of the network yield an acceleration in growth. You’ll hear much more in the the new year, but here are a few hints of what’s to come:

• Next year there will be significant advances toward Livepeer’s goal of becoming a full-service decentralized video stack as the proofs of concept developed by the core team in recent months reach full fruition. Some of the functionality set to debut in 2022: scene classification, object recognition, and song title detection.
• Livepeer will continue on its path to decentralization with better support for community-led initiatives and more opportunities for members to contribute openly to the growth of the ecosystem, including more community representation in Livepeer governance and funding through the Livepeer grants program.
• Full integration with MistServer, coupled with growing maturity in the Web3 space, will enable projects in the storage, compute and bandwidth arena to join Livepeer in its mission to help developers build exceptional Web3 apps that are indistinguishable from Web2.

That’s a wrap

A few final thoughts as we close 2021, a year when folks stopped talking about what blockchain technologies are and started looking at what they can do. But since it can be easy to miss a sea change when you’ve been there from the start, we want to take a moment to assure you that it’s real.

Thanks to everyone for your support, your contributions — and your shared determination to make Web3 the vehicle for better things to come!