Earnings Claiming Gas Cost Reductions: LIP-36 and LIP-52 Timeline

The Livepeer community has been working hard in the past few weeks to help reduce the gas costs of earnings claiming for tokenholders, allowing them to access staked LPT and perform staking actions that would otherwise be too expensive due to high gas prices on Ethereum. The updates are captured in two Livepeer Improvement Proposals (LIPs) — LIP-36 and LIP-52. Both proposals allow tokenholders to claim earnings at a constant gas cost regardless of how many rounds of earnings need to be claimed. LIP-36 introduces a more gas efficient earnings claiming algorithm that can be used to claim future earnings. LIP-52 introduces a community reviewable snapshot of the earnings owed to all tokenholders that can be used to claim past earnings.

If accepted by the community through the governance process, these updates would allow users to submit two low-cost transactions to fully claim all earnings and access their staked LPT, whereas at the moment claim transactions under current gas price conditions may cost the users hundreds of dollars worth of ETH.

LIP-36 and LIP-52 Timeline

• September 18th: A security audit conducted by an external company for LIP-36 will be completed by this date and any necessary updates based on the audit results will be made in the following days. LIP-52 will undergo a community driven security review process in lieu of a formal security audit led by an external company. The reason for scheduling a security audit led by an external company for LIP-36 and not LIP-52 is because the changes in LIP-36 are quite complex while the changes in LIP-52 are much simpler.
• September 21st: The LIP-36 poll starts kicking off a 9 day voting period during which staked tokenholders will be able to vote on whether to accept LIP-36.
• September 29th: The LIP-36 poll ends. The LIP-52 poll also starts kicking off a 9 day voting period during which staked tokenholders will be able to vote on whether to accept LIP-52. During the first 4 days of this voting period, the LIP-52 snapshot will not be available for review. The reason for not also deploying LIP-36 and generating the LIP-52 snapshot on this date is to allocate additional time for a) last minute testing of the LIP-36 changes, which are complex, on Rinkeby and b) ensuring that the LIP-52 snapshot verification tooling is ready for use when the snapshot is ready for review.
• October 2nd: LIP-36 is deployed. The LIP-52 snapshot is also generated and made available for review for the remaining 5 days of the LIP-52 poll voting period.
• October 7th: The LIP-52 poll ends and is deployed.

Note that the timeline and summary described above assume that LIP-36 and LIP-52 are accepted by tokenholders in their respective polls. If either of these LIPs are rejected in a poll, then the remaining steps in the timeline would not be executed.

LIP-36 and LIP-52 Deployment Process

In order to reduce the gas costs for earnings claiming as much as possible, the current plan is to deploy LIP-36 and LIP-52 with a couple day gap in between. The reason for deploying these two LIPs with a time gap in between is so that tokenholders can claim their earnings using the LIP-52 snapshot and then immediately use the new more gas efficient LIP-36 earnings claiming algorithm going forward.

When LIP-36 is deployed, the new earnings claiming algorithm will go into effect in the following round. So, ideally the LIP-52 snapshot would be generated for the round that LIP-36 is deployed. Since a snapshot can only be generated once the round is over, we would need need to wait until the round after LIP-36 is deployed to generate the snapshot. Additionally, it is important that the snapshot is available for tokenholders to review during the LIP-52 poll voting period so they can be confident that the snapshot was correctly generated. As a result, there needs to be a couple day gap after LIP-36 is deployed and the LIP-52 snapshot is generated so that there is a reasonable amount of time allocated for tokenholders to review the snapshot and vote in the LIP-52 poll.

Since many tokenholders are unable to access their staked LPT or perform additional staking actions due to high gas prices at this time, it would be beneficial to these tokenholders to deploy LIP-52 sooner rather than later. So, instead of starting the LIP-52 poll only after the snapshot becomes available for review, the current plan is for the snapshot to become available for review a few days into the voting period so that the time gap between the LIP-36 and LIP-52 deployment can be shortened.

If you have questions or comments and would like to get involved in the governance process to enact these updates, jump into the #community-governance channel in the Livepeer Discord chat, or weigh in in the discussion threads for either LIP-36 or LIP-52.