What is Livepeer (LPT)?

Livepeer is a decentralized network that describes itself as a marketplace for AI video compute. Apps that need video processed or AI models run send jobs to the network, and independent operators with graphics cards (GPUs) do the work and get paid. Livepeer's token, LPT, is used to secure and coordinate that market.

What is Livepeer crypto?

Livepeer was founded in 2017 by Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang, according to a Business Wire funding announcement. It started as a way to make live video streaming cheaper for developers. Video has to be transcoded, meaning converted into different sizes and formats so it plays smoothly on phones, laptops and slow connections, and that takes a lot of computing power.

Livepeer's idea was to rent that power from a network of independent GPU operators instead of a single cloud provider. Its docs now describe both video transcoding and AI inference, which means running trained AI models, as jobs the network handles. It fits the broader category of DePIN, networks that use tokens to coordinate real-world hardware.

How does Livepeer work?

The docs and glossary describe three main roles:

• Gateways collect requests from apps, choose operators and pay for the work.
• Orchestrators run GPU nodes, carry out video and AI jobs and earn ETH fees plus LPT rewards.
• Delegators stake LPT with an orchestrator they choose, helping secure the network and sharing in its rewards without running hardware.

Payments use probabilistic micropayment tickets. Each ticket has a face value and a chance of winning, and orchestrators cash only the winning tickets on chain for ETH. Over many tickets this averages out to fair pay while keeping on-chain costs low.

The network runs in rounds of about a day. Since February 14, 2022, protocol actions such as staking and reward payouts have taken place on Arbitrum instead of Ethereum's main chain, according to the docs.

What is the Livepeer token LPT used for?

LPT is a staking and coordination token. Users do not pay for video or AI jobs in LPT; those fees are paid in ETH.

Per the glossary, the orchestrators with the most LPT staked to them, commonly the top 100, form the active set. Only they can receive jobs and inflation rewards in a given round. New LPT is created each round and shared among stakers, and the rate adjusts toward a target of about 50% of LPT being staked.

Orchestrators must make an on-chain reward call each round to collect their share. If they miss it, they and their delegators lose that round's rewards. Leaving also takes time: unstaking has a waiting period, currently 7 rounds. The docs note that values such as inflation, the unbonding period and the size of the active set are set by governance and can change.

The general idea of locking tokens to earn network rewards is explained in what crypto staking is, and the same risks around operator performance apply.