Over the past several months the Livepeer community has been debating, shaping, building, and testing a proposal called Livepeer Delta, which is aimed at introducing sustainable public goods funding into the Livepeer ecosystem through a community governed, onchain treasury. The treasury would be populated by a portion of the daily Livepeer inflationary rewards over time, and token holders would have the ability to make proposals and subsequently vote on use of funds from the treasury. Spiritually, the treasury is to be used to fund efforts that benefit the entire ecosystem, including decentralization of demand generation efforts, core development, tools for node operators, video builders, and more.

This is a pivotally important moment for the Livepeer community and in Livepeer’s decentralization journey towards truly becoming the world’s open video infrastructure. A protocol can only be credibly neutral and sustainable if there are many stakeholders building on and contributing to it, and there is a clear motivation for economically rational actors to maintain and shape it over time. Delta puts some important building blocks in place to enable this.

This post aims to give you the information you need to know to get up to speed on Delta, the timeline under which this proposal will be voted on and potentially go live, and ways for you to get involved.

Background

Here are some links to familiarize yourself with more information on Delta:

• Original Delta Introduction and Pre-proposal

• The Livepeer Improvement Proposals (LIPs), to actually be voted on: LIP-91, LIP-92

• Initial forum discussion thread, and discussion threads for LIP-91 and LIP-92

• Discussion thread on Video Innovators DAO - a community formed retroactive funding entity focused on rewarding demand-generating applications, that intends to apply to the community for treasury funding.

While there is a lot of information on the above, the simple facts are as described in the intro:

• An onchain treasury will be populated with LPT each round from the existing round-based inflation

• Tokenholders can make proposals and vote on these proposals using the common Governor framework in use within many treasury management programs and DAOs

• The social convention is that valid proposals will release funds to special purpose entities that have their own form of governance, and specialize in distributing funds to end users according to their stated mission.

  • For example the Video Innovators DAO will have the mission of retroactively rewarding demand generating apps and tools.

  • A grants program may be proactively giving microgrants for public goods.

  • A liquidity program may be applying the rewarded LPT into L2 bridging solutions.

  • Etc.

Timeline

Debate, implementation, and testing have been underway for months, and the proposal is getting close to a vote. Here’s a rough timeline of what you can expect, though some exact dates may change:

• August 30 - Proposal moves into Last Call

• August 31 - September 6 Code4rena Public Audit competition

• September 6 - Voting on proposal opens

  • (Depending on results of audit competition)

• September 15 - Deployment of Livepeer Delta

  • (Depending on the proposal passing vote)

• Mid October - Initial treasury applications and tokenholder votes, likely via Video Innovators DAO

How you can get involved

• Stake LPT to Participate in Vote

  • Even without significant LPT, active leadership and energy in proposal discussions goes a long way to shaping positive outcomes

• Join Community

• Comment on Proposals

  • Short term: Delta enablement

    • The Livepeer Improvement Proposals (LIPs), to actually be voted on: LIP-91, LIP-92

    • Initial forum discussion thread, and discussion threads for LIP-91 and LIP-92

  • Long term: Ongoing treasury funding proposals

    • Discussion thread on Video Innovators DAO - a community formed retroactive funding entity focused on rewarding demand-generating applications, that intends to apply to the community for treasury funding.

• Audit Competition

  • Sign up as a warden ahead of the competition to participate

This is an exciting moment for the Livepeer ecosystem, whereby tokenholding participants in the network will now have a direct mechanism to route protocol-enabled funding to the efforts they deem critical to the success of the project. Incentivizing helpful active participation has always been the main driver behind the economic design of the incentives in the Livepeer protocol, and this is yet one more opportunity for the protocol to distribute power to active participants. Get involved today!