Livepeer’s Decentralized Governance Process is Now Ratified

We are excited to share that the first community governance poll run within the Livepeer ecosystem has passed. After a 10 day voting period, the community overwhelmingly voted to ratify the decentralized governance process which will be used to shape the future of the Livepeer protocol and network.

This is a big milestone, as it means that all tokenholders, operators, and users of the Livepeer network now have clear process, rules, and tools to use in order to suggest, debate, approve, and execute updates to Livepeer.

With over 72% of all active stake participating in the vote, the proposal passed with 99% of participants voting in favor. Some other relevant statistics about this first poll:

• 10,654,456 LPT worth of stake participated in the vote
• 10,576,381 LPT voted yes
• 78,074 voted no
• 23 orchestrators voted
• 22 orchestrators did not vote. (View the list of which voted and which did not.)
• 66 tokenholding delegators voted, with 39 overriding votes of their orchestrator.

Any community member who would like to verify the results of the poll can do so using the open source poll-tally tool available via Github.

Now that this vote has concluded, the Livepeer Improvement Proposal process has been ratified and the LIP-1 document has been updated to reflect the new governance process, and LIP-16, which describes the polling process, is now marked final.

The Strength of Decentralization

One nice thing to note about the participation numbers in this first poll is that phases one and two of Livepeer’s decentralization roadmap, the decentralization of network operations and the decentralization of stake, were enormously successful as it relates to this third phase of decentralization — community governance.

The decentralization of network operations has lead to 45 current orchestrators, with only two such orchestrators being run by the Livepeer, Inc company itself, neither being in the top ten in orchestrator stake-weight. The decentralization of stake effort, with the Merklemine distribution and ongoing inflationary token distribution, has lead to a distribution in which no one party had overwhelmingly significant power to determine the output of a vote. Livepeer, Inc actively voted but with stake of less than 8% of the potential voting power on the network. In fact, less than 2% of the voting stake on the network needed to be actively voted from the company, as delegating voting power to the wide array of orchestrators on the network proved effective. Compare this to other protocols where core entities find themselves in the position to have the power to swing votes by having control of over 50% of protocol stake.

While combatting the centralization of Livepeer network operations and economics will always be something that the community always strives towards, they can see through this first poll that they have achieved a very wide participatory base with the power to operate the network and to shape its future.

What’s Next?

Now that the Livepeer community has come to consensus on this starting point for the governance process, there are a number of areas where the community can use said process in order to continue to evolve Livepeer in the short and medium term:

• The core team will press forward with phase two of the governance roadmap — a technical step that makes moving from a non-binding voting scheme that needs to be carried out by the core team, to a binding voting scheme where the results of polls are automatically executed.
• Those interested in governance can continue the discussion that has already been about how to evolve to more complex-yet-powerful governance mechanisms beyond this simple stake-weighted starting point. Prior to this proposal being accepted it was difficult to determine sentiment and acceptance of more complex ideas in governance, but now the processes and tools are in place where the community can come to clear decisions on such topics.
• Many have begun taking on the hard questions that will face Livepeer in the coming years related to the economic incentives in the protocol. The recent community call contained great discussion on inflation, fees, and continuing the bootstrap the network. Tokenholders can poll the community sentiment around these ideas or implement and execute changes if consensus is formed.
• For those who are using the LIP process to participate in governance, and would like to discuss the existing LIP proposals or get feedback in realtime on proposals they are involved in, there are bi-weekly LIP calls that will take place, that are open to all. The next one is on Thursday, May 28th.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the process and initial poll. If you would like to get involved in governance and the future of Livepeer, the best way to do so is to say hello in the #community-governance Discord channel.