The @LivepeerOrg team has planned and executed a tremendous undertaking for their decentralized protocol so far. 🍻 Putting down some thoughts on the realities of Livepeer’s token model as it exists today. . . 👇
- $LPT is more accessible than funding rounds of startups. You can even get a better deal on $LPT than its private investors by mining it, running a transcoder, or getting it free in the airdrop. That’s cool & these opportunities are overlooked by the ICO-obsessed mainstream.
- On that note, while the early sell orders on $LPT hang around $7-10 (on low volume), Merkle miners have obtained $LPT priced as low as $0.66, better than the last round. Other miners have elected to pay as much as $37 per $LPT in recent conditions. 🤔 (etherscan.io/tx/0x7d4a0a709…)
- $LPT whales could be dangerous, & despite strict vesting, there are avenues to $LPT whaledom. (For instance, by making deals.) In Livepeer’s pseudonymous setup a whale can delegate $LPT to his own transcoder, sipping on the sweet inflation rewards in spite of decentralization.
- While the daily inflation schedule remains well-defined, the ability to change the active transcoder limit has practical impact on individual rewards. If that parameter can eventually be tweaked by whales in a governance system, the decentralization of the network is at risk.
- Transcoders on Livepeer today are setting reward cuts and fee shares. “High-cut” transcoders take an expensive carry on its delegator’s rewards. “High-share” transcoders share large percentages of its $ETH transcoding fees with its delegators.
- The two schools of Livepeer transcoders seem to be “high-cut/high-share” and “low-cut/low-share”. But watch out for clever marketing: since the network is seldom utilized today for transcoding, a fee share of 0 fees is still 0. 😇
👇
