The Livepeer Network was launched on Ethereum’s Mainnet on May 1st. It was an important milestone that marks the end of the Snowmelt phase. Since then, the team has been busy making small fixes and improvements. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and we are excited to continue pushing forward. I’d like to share a little about what we’ve learned so far from the launch, and what we are planning to do for the next phase.
What We Learned So Far
The emphasis on the Snowmelt phase was on functional correctness rather than performance and robustness. The launch made it possible for anyone to participate in the Livepeer protocol via becoming a transcoder, or doing the MerkleMine to generate tokens/delegate. Since the launch, the Livepeer network has:
- Achieved a full active transcoder set.
- Attracted important community contributions like the creation of Supermax — a community-built Livepeer block explorer. (They have recently won prizes from Edcon and Consensus 2018)
- Created two self-incentivized community transcoding nodes, with one of the nodes already instrumenting a transparent community grants program.
- Live streamed numerous events like the Ethereum Foundation core dev call, Ethereal, Swarm Summit, and the Truebit Berlin Meetup using the open source Livepeer broadcasting software. We continue to stream new events like EthBA summit coming up this Saturday at crypto.livepeer.tv
- Moved towards decentralized governance by solidifying the Livepeer Improvement Proposal (LIP) process.
Tributary Phase and Livepeer Transcoding Network
As we continue to monitor the activity and performance of the network, the Livepeer core team has started to plan for the next phase — Tributary. For the next 2–3 months, we will be making a series of improvements to the network to increase performance and continue to decentralize the network.
In addition, Livepeer is focused to create a cheap and reliable decentralized transcoding network in the next 6–8 months. We call it the “Livepeer Transcoding Network”. It serves as a cheaper, more scalable, and decentralized alternative to the centralized video transcoding services today. This means Livepeer will not only benefit decentralized video applications like Paratii and Dlive, but ANY video application with a transcoding need.
To make this a reality, we are adding many new features into the existing network to improve reliability and reduce cost. This includes a list of engineering and research projects. We will continue to work with the Livepeer community in these areas, and will continue to reward contributors through the forms of bounties and research grants.
Engineering Focus
The Livepeer Transcoding Network is a highly available, decentralized transcoding network that incentivizes performant video transcoding via open access and competition. The engineering team will be focusing on features like:
- Live and VOD video transcoding, paid in Eth
- Simple API to abstract protocol complexity from application developers
- Reliability and scaling solution for transcoders via transcoder race and transcoder pools
- Cryptoeconomically secure protocol for transcoding job execution
- Competition between transcoders via transparency and token delegation scheme
Active Research Areas
Livepeer is doing something unique and new in the intersection of video and blockchain industry. We are working on new problems that straddles academic research and real-world software engineering. However, we can’t do it alone. If you are a researcher or hacker interested in collaborating, please reach out to us on the forum or discord. Some of the active research areas for the Tributary phase include:
- Continue to push forward on decentralized transcoding verification with the Truebit team
- Ethereum scalability solutions for Livepeer (POA, Ethermint, Plasma)
- Gas accounting for video transcoding
- Non-deterministic, GPU-based transcoding verification
- Transcoding pool
A more detailed product roadmap can be found here. Please join us in the Livepeer community discord chat and forum.
Note: Please join the Livepeer team on a community call to discuss the roadmap and research topics on May 29th 11am EST.
