Livepeer Whitepaper

Doug Petkanics
2 min readApr 20, 2017

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A little over one month ago we announced The Livepeer Project — an open effort to build the live video streaming layer in the decentralized development stack. The goal is for any live streamer or broadcaster to stream a video into Livepeer, and the network will take care of encoding it into all of the formats and bitrates necessary to reach the majority of devices on the planet, as well as handling the distribution of video in a decentralized way without reliance on central servers or companies.

Today we are pleased to present The Livepeer Whitepaper, which describes the protocol, security, and economic incentives involved in Livepeer. The protocol is based around a new blockchain token called Livepeer Token (LPT). According to the paper, when users run Livepeer:

a self-scaling, pay-as-you-go network is made available to developers, who can simply send their live stream into the network, and have the implementation details of scaling, payment, and media hosting abstracted away.

The Whitepaper is a technical document that presents solutions to the following problems in cryptoeconomic incentivized work networks:

  1. Scalable verification of transcoding work.
  2. Disincentives for fake work and gamification of the system in order to unfairly capture Livepeer token.
A preview of the roles and information flow in the Livepeer Protocol

If you’re interested in cryptoeconomic protocols, please give the whitepaper a read, and don’t hesitate to share feedback. If you’re looking for a less technical overview of Livepeer, check out the Project Overview.

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Doug Petkanics

Building live streaming on the blockchain at Livepeer. Previously Founder, VP Eng at Wildcard and Hyperpublic (acquired by Groupon).