Protocol
This week at Livepeer the implementation of the Livepeer Protocol began to take shape. We are calling the first milestone in protocol development “Mintable Token”, and it includes the following goals:
- Livepeer Token
- Protocol Smart Contract with protocol parameters and initializer
- Bonding/Unbonding
- Transcoder election rounds
- Reward function and associated transcoder state tracking
At this point nodes in the network could presumably go through the full process of delegation, transcoder election, and reward function invocation. Essentially this would be the MVP for stake based token distribution without slashing.
We have completed the first pass up to bonding/unbonding and tracking active and candidate transcoders based on their cumulative stake. As soon as we get through this milestone we will open source the progress so far and push forward towards the next milestone, which introduces transcoding jobs and claims of work.
Video Delivery
On the video side of the house, we introduced support traditional CDNs on top of Livepeer. But wait, that’s not decentralized?!?!?!
You’re right. For those of you using the Livepeer Desktop App or a local Livepeer node to build a DApp or broadcast video to your decentralization-crazed friends, you can continue to do so and enjoy all the benefits and advantages of full decentralization. But for those of you who want to send out a livestream, and simply send a link it it out on twitter, or pass a web link to a friend, you can take advantage of Amazon Cloudfront to do so. This will no longer be necessary after we build an in-browser Livepeer node…but…baby steps. Look for a writeup shortly and desktop app update to show you how to share public links to your streams.
Crypto Week NYC
We’re looking forward to the week of May 22-25th when so many folks from around the world will be coming to NYC for the Consensus Conference and Token Summit. We’ll be around both events, and are happy to talk to folks about how you can build live streaming into your apps using Livepeer. Let us know if you want to catch up!