Theta Validator unstaking to accelerate future ecosystem growth
For the past several years Theta Labs has unstaked certain amounts of THETA tokens from the project treasury in order to fund ecosystem growth, decentralize the Theta protocol and expand enterprise validators now up to 25 including Google, Samsung, Sony, CAA and others. These efforts have been successful with an explosion of new Theta projects emerging in the past year, from Replay video payments tracking and their new platform Rewarded TV, to NFT projects like Passaways and Secret Pineapple Society, to decentralized ticketing services like Metapass. Here’s a complete list of Theta ecosystem partners — https://www.thetatoken.org/ecosystem.
With Theta Metachain due for release as Mainnet 4.0 in Q4 2022, many more will be joining them to take advantage of the Metachain’s highly customizable and infinitely-scalable subchain architecture. We’ve also made incredible strides in developing decentralized Web3 tools for video and media, such as decentralized video encoding, livestreaming support for the Theta Video API, and the first-ever implementation of NFT-based DRM.
Despite markets struggling this year in crypto and around the world, the Theta ecosystem remains in a strong position for future development and increased adoption globally. Theta Labs plans to unstake a small portion of its treasury — 15M THETA out of the total 165M treasury staked — to accelerate the momentum in core protocol development, community development and user adoption to further establish Theta as the leading blockchain for video, media and entertainment. These funds will be allocated to technology and business development, Metachain ecosystem incentives, future Theta Hackathon prize funding, marketing, and other ecosystem initiatives.
This initiative also continues moving the network toward full decentralization with Theta Labs reducing its staking percentage from ~27% to ~24% of the total Theta staked among all validators and guardians. Combined with the lowering of Validator Node stake requirements to 200k and the addition of many new community Validator Nodes, these steps are ensuring Theta ecosystem becomes increasingly decentralized and less reliant on Theta Labs over time.
This will be key to a successful launch of Theta Metachain in December 2022, as well as maintaining Theta Network’s leadership position as the de-facto Web3 infrastructure and blockchain for the media and entertainment industry. We are excited to continue driving innovation across livestream video, decentralized video relaying, edge compute and storage, NFTs, live experiences, and much more to come, all powered by Theta’s Mainnet 4.0 release.
