The Confluence Post-Launch Update
It has been 45 days since Livepeer’s migration to Layer 2 officially went live. Confluence, the protocol upgrade proposed to the community last fall, aimed to mitigate rising Ethereum gas fees and increase network adoption. Thanks to the support of the Livepeer core team and members of the community, the Confluence protocol upgrade and migration to Arbitrum went into effect on February 15th, 2022. Since then, the network has seen full adoption of L2 by its Orchestrators, and a drastic increase in staking activity by its Delegators. The migration to L2 marks a major step for Livepeer becoming the video infrastructure layer of web3.
Impact on Orchestrators
Overall uptake since the upgrade has been excellent. All high-performing Orchestrator nodes have successfully migrated to L2 over the past month and a half. The Livepeer protocol currently maintains a capacity of 100 node operators (although a plan to expand this number is on the 2022 Roadmap). The move to Arbitrum led to the migration of 87 Orchestrators, and incentivized new node operators to join the protocol to take advantage of the low fees on L2. As of today, there are 96 Orchestrators active on the protocol — only four spots remain unfilled. The Livepeer community is excited to welcome the new Orchestrators and their contribution towards network stability and security.
Key metrics
- 87 Orchestrators migrated to L2 at the time of the protocol upgrade.
- 9 new Orchestrators have joined since; bringing the total number of Orchestrators on the network to 96.
- The 56 high-performing nodes previously on L1 all successfully migrated to L2; in addition, we’ve seen the number of high-performing nodes grow to 62 since the Confluence upgrade.
- Approximately 99.9% of all LPT staked to Orchestrators has successfully migrated.
- As a result of the switch to Arbitrum from Ethereum mainnet, Orchestrators now need 97% less LPT staked to their node to call reward profitably. See chart below:
Impact on Delegators
The move to Arbitrum allowed token holders to delegate with multiple Orchestrators, and move stake more easily between Orchestrators with significantly lower fees. As a result, Livepeer has seen a leap in delegation activity, with a 191x increase in the total amount of staked LPT moved. There has also been a 73x increase in the frequency of staking/unstaking since Confluence went live. In other words, the protocol upgrade has enabled a more dynamic marketplace in which token holders can competitively choose where to stake their LPT.
Key metrics
- A total of 787 Delegators have successfully claimed their staking rewards on L2 since the migration. It’s worth noting that Delegators who haven’t yet moved over to Abititrum are still able to earn rewards.
- As shown by the graph below, the move to Arbitrum led to a spike in the movement of Delegators’ stake across Orchestrator nodes compared to pre-Confluence. From the beginning of the year to the migration to Confluence on February 15th, there were approximately 38,000 LPT staked and unstaked between Orchestrators. Since then, February 15th and March 30th, more than 7.2 million LPT has moved between Orchestrators.
Looking ahead
The shift to Confluence may be complete, but the Livepeer community remains ready to help out fellow members with L2 migration questions (the conversation continues on the Discord channel #layer2-confluence-support.) There is a weekly water-cooler chat on the Livepeer Discord where individuals can discuss current topics with fellow Orchestrators. Additionally, the community can also learn about planned product updates in the newly published 2022 Network Product Roadmap.
The success of Confluence has set the stage for a busy 2022, the core team and the Livepeer community as a whole look forward to making future strides towards the goal of making Livepeer the video infrastructure layer of web3.
