The Grayscale investment company that had previously founded a Bitcoin fund, in March 2021 announced that it wanted to create a new fund containing other cryptocurrencies. Most cryptocurrencies were among the most famous coins like Chainlink and Filecoin, but the fund also included another cryptocurrency that surprised even the crypto fans. This cryptocurrency was Livepeer.
Livepeer is an Ethereum-based decentralized video streaming service that aims to stream videos online with a high level of quality and low cost. In this article, we will explain what Livepeer exactly does and how it realizes its aim. Stay with us.

What is Livepeer?

We previously said that Livepeer is a decentralized video streaming platform. But it would be more accurate to say that it is a decentralized service that aims to minimize the foundational costs of online video streaming applications. So, Livepeer can’t be considered an alternative to YouTube. It is rather a solution for application developers. It distributes the duty of encoding videos or changing them from one format to another, among its participating computers. Livepeer claims that it has reduced the foundational costs in comparison with its traditional rivals by 50 times.

How does Livepeer work?

Livepeer’s main foundation is its “orchestrators”. Orchestrators are users who have dedicated their computers, resources, CPUs, GPUs, and bandwidths to the Livepeer network. They encode the videos and prepare them for being streamed. Developers and owners of the videos who use the Livepeer network for streaming their videos must pay the fees through LPT tokens. This fee goes to the orchestrators in return for their resources. It’s worth mentioning that Livepeer uses a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, so users can also stake their LPT tokens and earn rewards (like all other proof-of-stake networks).

What unique features does Livepeer have?

Online streaming of videos is costly for application developers. This cost is then compensated by the users. Users may not understand, but they compensate for the developers’ expenses by being forced to watch advertisements, or even by their personal data being sold to certain companies.
Livepeer distributes the computational need and reduces the cost this way. It pays the orchestrators through the fees developers pay, but this fee is significantly low in comparison with the expenses of streaming videos in the traditional systems. Livepeer creates new commercial models and revolutionizes video-streaming applications.

Who is the audience of Livepeer?

We previously mentioned that the audience of Livepeer is developers and video creators. A user who is watching a video encoded by Livepeer may not understand the role of Livepeer at all. But this doesn’t mean that users don’t benefit from Livepeer. Livepeer reduces the costs for the developers, and this finally reduces the costs for the users. Besides, users can be sure that they are using a completely decentralized service. Therefore, the content they watch will not be banned, it will be censorship-resistant, and it will not stop servicing due to problems like “single point of failure”.

The LTP token

Livepeer’s native token is called LPT. At the time of writing, each unit of LPT is being traded at $12.03. This token’s all-time high goes back to November 2021 when its price went above $70. LPT has the rank 116 among the world’s largest cryptocurrencies by market cap. Its market cap (at the time of writing) is more than 290 million dollars. LPT doesn’t have a max supply. Its circulating supply (at the time of writing) is more than 24 million units.

The LTP wallets

Since LPT is an Ethereum-based token, you can use all Ethereum wallets for storing it. Some of the best options for this purpose include:

  • Ledger
  • Trezor
  • MetaMask
  • Trust Wallet
  • MyEtherWallet
  • ImToken
  • Guarda
  •  SafePal

Conclusion

In this article, we tried to go over Livepeer and its main aims in simple terms. Now you know that Livepeer is a decentralized service with the aim of minimizing the costs of online video streaming. This reduction of costs benefits both the developers and the end users. As the final point, we would like to say that Livepeer is not the only project focusing on this aim. It has great rivals like Theta and VideoCoin. However, Livepeer has a big advantage, and that is Grayscale’s investment. This investment one other time reveals the bright future of Web3 projects and decentralized alternatives.

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