Livepeer Delegation Tutorial
Simple Staking Tutorial by Stake Capital
Welcome to this simple Livepeer Delegation Tutorial. You will need:
- access to your Ethereum address holding your Livepeer token.
- approximately 0.0035 ETH (~$0.6) to execute 2 transactions at “10 Gwei” each. These values will fluctuate with network congestion and ether price.
- 5 minutes of your time.
Introduction on Livepeer and Staking
Livepeer is an open, community-driven project, building technology for broadcasting and streaming live video over the internet. The project is built on Ethereum, and it incentivises anybody willing to contribute in securing the network, sharing their processing power, and sharing their bandwidth. Those contributors are called transcoders and they can earn rewards for their contribution.
Stake Capital is proud to be one of Livepeer’s transcoders. Token holders who also want to participate in the Livepeer economy without running their own infrastructure can do so by bonding their tokens to a transcoder, and earn a share of the generated rewards. The transcoders with the most tokens bonded to them will have more transcoding work directed to them, and the delegators stand to earn more tokens as well.
Stake Capital charges a market leading 1% fee on the realised yield, and returns 99% of the rewards to its delegators. In addition, Stake Capital shares 50% of the earnings received from transcoding work to its delegators. (Refer to FAQ below for more info).
Step 0: Withdraw your Livepeer Tokens
If you currently store your Livepeer Tokens (LPT) on an exchange, you will first need to withdraw your tokens to your personal Ethereum wallet, such as the web browser extension Metamask or a hardware wallet (Ledger nano S, Trezor, …).
If you are setting up your wallet for the first time, we recommend using Metamask.io (they have an excellent video tutorial on their website).
Step 1: Visit Stake Capital’s transcoder page
To begin the process, visit Stake Capital’s transcoder page. Our transcoder address is 0xa6a9eb29e786b5233bd99c0ba28be882fe954a0e, which you can find at the top left and centre of your screen, next to our purple avatar.
You should see a BOND button as well, as shown in the picture above. The BOND button will only load if you have unlocked your metamask extension. Note: If you have a hardware wallet, you can import your account in metamask as well.
Click the BOND button to initiate the delegation process.
Step 2: Update your allowance
When you click on BOND, you will be prompted to grant Livepeer’s smart contract the right to transfer your LPT tokens. Click on the update your transfer allowance button and define your transfer allowance. We advise defining a higher than necessary allowance, if for example you later decide to stake more tokens. An Ethereum transaction will be required to finalise this step.
On Chrome Browser:
On Brave Browser:
Step 3: Stake your Tokens
Go back on the BOND page, where your transfer allowance will now be updated.
Enter the amount of LPT you wish to delegate and click submit, then confirm the transaction from your metamask.
FAQ
How much can I earn from bonding?
As a delegator, you have two revenue stream: 1. block rewards, and 2. fee sharing.
- Currently, the expected yield from block rewards is 150%, and we charge a market leading 1% commission. If you bond 1 LPT, you can expect to have approximately 2.485 LPT in 12 months. Note that this rate is not constant, and does fluctuate with the total number of LPT bonded across all delegators.
- The fee sharing is harder to predict as it is driven by fees paid to Stake Capital for transcoding videos. These fees are paid in Ether, and we fixed it to 150 Gwei per 4 seconds. We will share 50% of the fees generated from our transcoding activity to our delegators.
How do I view my rewards?
To view your rewards, go on the Livepeer explorer, then click on the My Account shortcut at the right of the screen, then click on staking, where you will see your stake and rewards. (note: you will need to be logged into your metamask account for your account to load)
How can I claim my rewards?
Rewards are paid after each round (approximately every 24 hours), and will automatically accrue to your account, but you do need to claim your tokens by submitting an Ethereum transaction. Because claiming tokens costs gas, you can claim up to 20 rounds at a time, meaning that you do not have to claim them everyday. Your rewards are always yours, and you can claim them anytime.
To view and claim your rewards, go to your account page on Livepeer’s explorer.
Are there any risks associated with bonding my tokens?
Livepeer will eventually implement slashing conditions to penalise transcoders who are offline. The delegators would also be slashed, hence the importance of choosing reliable transcoders like Stake Capital.
Livepeer does not currently slash transcoders and delegators can delegate with no risk. When this changes, it will be communicated clearly on their twitter account, and we will also communicate it on our twitter and telegram account.
Can I transfer my bond to another transcoder?
Once you have bonded your tokens with a transcoder, it is very easy to move them to another validator. For example, let’s say you wish to transfer your tokens to Stake Capital.
Just like in Step 1, visit Stake Capital’s transcoder page, and click on BOND. If you enter 0 in the box, as shown in the screenshot below, and submit the transaction, your bonded tokens will be transferred to Stake Capital’s transcoder.
How can I un-bond my tokens?
When you bond, your tokens are locked in for at least as long as the Unbonding Period, which is currently a few weeks. You can unbound your token from your account page on Livepeer’s explorer.
If you want to learn more about delegating on Livepeer, please join our Telegram support, where our team will be happy to assist you, or you can read the more in-depth wiki on Delegations from Livepeer.
