Livepeer Delta Phase Pre-Proposal - Sustainability, Public Goods Funding, Treasury, and Decentralization

One additional point worth highlighting in the context of the pre-proposal…

The pre-proposal suggested that the existing Livepeer security committee be controlled via this binding on chain governance - with the ability to add keys, remove keys, and change the threshold for number of security committee signatures needed to make a protocol upgrade. This is not included in the above LIPs, because it was outside of the scope of the treasury, but if the treasury LIP passes, then it would be great to follow up with a proposal for making the governor the owner of the security committee permissioning, in which case this decentralized control over the committee (and ability to remove it if deemed appropriate) could pass to the hands of the token holders, rather than being enforced via social contract.

1 Like

Reposting here as it seems to be where most of the discussions happened.

FTR there is now a devnet with the upgraded Delta contracts that can be tested on a separate explorer as well! Accessible here: Delta Goerli Explorer

For full details on how to setup your account and what to test, check this guide: Testing the Livepeer Treasury

Thanks for anyone that can give it a try :slight_smile:

would advocate for focusing on public goods for the ecosystem as a higher priority for the treasury first

Public good funding and for-profit does not have to be mutually exclusive, instead can be complementary.
Much infrastructure is a public good, that does not mean its usage is free. It is subsidized in part by the revenue it generates and taxes levied on it (e.g. public roads, state owned railways/airlines, utilities, …).

  • I am opposed to the idea of using a LIP to re-distribute stake of a selected number of addresses because a) I have not seen a credibly neutral method of doing this i.e. does not retroactively single out entities based on subjective discretion without clear pre-defined protocol/social rules that were violated b) this practically is unlikely to work because addresses that would be affected would be able unstake and withdraw prior to the LIP being executed. I do believe that addressing the issue of stronger alignment between work performed by orchestrators and LPT rewards received is important though - I just don’t think retroactive actions such as a LIP to re-distribute stake are the right approach.

There have been single entities mentioned, because it’s very clearly empirically visible as to the behaviour of some node operators. While no single entity should indeed be singled out by protocol rules or social contract, there should be rules that prevent rent-seeking behaviour which can be credibly neutral. In fact, I think we can all agree that some orchestrators are breaking the social contract and shared values many of us have (i.e. actually doing work and running a GPU), which is why we are luckily having this discussion.

Alternatively if a group of actors disagrees with the direction of the current ruleset or social contract, there is always the radical fork choice. A group of actors with the same shared values can align and fork the protocol with a redistribution of stake. While radical it is credibly neutral if the fork finds majority support.

Fork Choice Rule and Fair token distribution are two key components that actually make up credible neutrality in blockchain networks.

For example, if the Livepeer foundation and insiders controls the bulk of the votes for these governance proposals, there is no credible neutrality either.


Thanks @t_norm for some number crunching.

With the current proposal at taking 10% of the inflation, the demand generated by this public goods funding would have to be ~2300% higher than what it currently is, which doesn’t add up for me.

The proposal might make more sense if it would start lower, and see if it can actually generate demand growth to warrant increasing the % of inflation going to this funding.

Alternatively, the entities/people in support of the proposal could first prove with skin in the game that public goods funding could indeed drive demand at a rate that might lead to a sustainable proposal.