A Proposed Scaling Strategy for the Livepeer Protocol

Research & Protocol Improvements
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  1. With broadcasters possibly discovering Orchestrators on multiple chains would the stake from the subnets be combined for one total stake amount for selection process?

I see the following options right now:

  1. A broadcaster considers all orchestrators across all its supported subnets during selection. This should basically result in the same effect as the scenario that you described.

  2. A broadcaster first considers orchestrators on L2 during selection. Then, if the performance on L2 is degraded for a certain # of streams, the broadcaster can fallback and consider orchestrators on L1 during selection. As a result, the broadcaster will bias towards orchestrators on L2.

I’m leaning toward 2 right now because:

  • It will be faster to support technically
  • It provides an additional incentive for orchestrators to migrate to L2 while still preserving the ability to utilize orchestrators on L1 if needed (at least until those orchestrators migrate to L2 as well)
  1. Delegators will pay transaction costs to move to L2?

Yes. Although with the latest update to LIP-73, it would technically be possible for a third party to pay the transaction costs for the migration tx if the delegator signs a message and provides the signature to the third party.

We’re hoping to have a better sense of the transaction costs for the migration tx after making more progress on the LIP-73 implementation.

  1. With possibly multiple TicketBroker deposits, would it be 2x the deposit needed currently on L1? Or if a broadcaster only put a deposit on L2, would the broadcaster only be able to interact with that subnet of orchestrators?

Yes. At the moment, a broadcaster would need 2x the funds to use both L1 and L2. As mentioned in the OP, this is definitely a downside. After a move to L2, improvements to the payment protocol could reduce this burden for broadcasters - generally, the payment protocol is due for some improvements anyway because even outside of this context broadcasters currently have pretty hefty capital lockup requirements. Prior to that, the scope of impact of this burden is somewhat limited by the fact that a) most broadcasters today are operated by Livepeer Inc. which can shoulder that burden for a bit and b) broadcasters operated by others can choose to just use L2 to reduce the burden a bit.

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