Last week, Livepeer Foundation introduced Surge, a strategy to help accelerate the ecosystem through a Transformation SPE. This was the culmination of strategy setting by Advisory Boards and included their tactical recommendations and workstreams.
We received clear feedback that the proposal covered too much at once. The scope was too wide, the budget too high, and we had not sufficiently prioritised driving immediate impact.
This revised pre-proposal reflects that feedback, while maintaining the intent for us to Surge. It focuses on fewer workstreams, with clearer priorities, and a more disciplined approach to funding what will make an impact for Livepeer today.
Introduction: Surge Update
What is Surge?
Surge is an important phase for the Livepeer ecosystem. It reflects a desire to move and align faster, with better coordination and increased urgency. It marks the shift from strategic planning to delivering real outcomes that improve the network and expand its reach.
Surge builds on the Cascade strategy and aims to:
- Create Alignment and Focus around work and priorities that need contribution, funding and support
- Create Speed of execution by unlocking financial resources in our treasury and attracting new and existing talent towards priority tasks
- Promote Coordination across contributions, ensuring that scaling up contributions does not come at the expense of quality and high levels of performance
We propose the creation of a Transformation SPE that uses practical mechanisms to deliver on these aims.
What is the Transformation SPE?
The Transformation SPE is a funding mechanism that routes resources to attract and activate community talent to priority work. The Livepeer Foundation will coordinate this effort.
No funding from this SPE goes to core Foundation team members or the Foundation itself.
Using the SPE mechanism ensures transparency, accountability to the community, and demonstrates the value of the SPE vehicle.
One primary element of the Transformation SPE will be its use of the Request For Proposals (RFP) mechanism. RFPs create an open and transparent process for the allocation of work and resources to community members, both new and old. Benefits of an RFP process for the allocation of work include:
- RFPs can rapidly deploy secured funds without the need for onchain proposals
- RFPs create an open and transparent process. They can attract new talent to the ecosystem, and enable price discovery for the optimal completion of work
- RFPs create transparency around resource allocation decisions (ie. we will share reasoning for why we chose specific teams and proposals)
What Has Changed in this proposal?
(1) Clearer Workstream Prioritisation
We have re-prioritised workstreams based on urgency and importance to deliver immediate impact. This has reduced the overall scope.
Workstreams included in and funded by this proposal:
Capital - We have urgent needs to address capital challenges, and will increase value through active capital management that delivers an increase to onchain dex liquidity, a proposal to tackle inflation, increased yield from current capital/treasury assets, and provide a POV on treasury cap and risk management within current practices.
View details here: Increase Value through Active Capital Management
Builders - Builders are not currently supported in a structured way, and we will address this pain point to attract top builders by improving builder onboarding and establishing go-to-market partnerships and integrations for new ecosystem bets, such as with Open Social platforms (e.g. Base, Zora), and Agent Frameworks (e.g. Eliza). We will create a new Builders Hub, and drive awareness through new technical content and the creation of a developer relations function.
View details here: Accelerate New Use Cases through Attracting Top Builders
Development - The ecosystem needs more effective coordination of core development groups and SPEs to deliver on core protocol and network upgrades. The LF will seed and establish a new Protocol Development SPE (with a new proposal) to maintain a secure and improving network core, whilst working with existing groups to address fragmentation in developer experience, particularly focused on core video APIs and payment flows. To provide alignment and accountability, the LF will work on coordination mechanisms and cadences to drive SPEs forward towards a common and ensure real-time data is available through maintenance of the explorer.
View details here: Upgrade Core Network & Protocol through Core Dev Coordination
Workstreams that are not funded by the proposal:
- Brand & Narrative - Based on our community survey and the findings of the Advisory the LF continues to see this workstream as critical to the next chapter of the Livepeer project. Following the feedback on the first iteration of the pre-proposal, we have decided to internalise these efforts within the Foundation budget.
- LPT Participation Case - Marketing the compelling narrative around LPT as demand on the network rises will be important, but until then other items have more urgency. The Foundation will make progress on this internally and provide updates as needed.
- Data & Tooling - The Foundation has begun work to outline data requirements and the next steps to upgrade the Explorer, which we will share with the community in time. Improvements to the Explorer have been included in the Development workstream.
- Contributor Coordination - This workstream has largely been included in the Development workstream, which we acknowledge needs coordination.
- Orchestrators & Supply - The Foundation will work with other SPEs and contributors to deliver on this workstream. We are excited to scope out some key opportunities.
(2) Increased Focus on Coordination over Direct Ownership
We will focus on our important role of being a team that can coordinate and bring alignment across contributing teams, rather than expand the scope of work under our direction.
We see that Livepeer has many excellent teams contributing and willing to deploy their talents to key initiatives, and we will aim to accelerate their impact by better connecting across various teams and SPEs, and by better helping direct their efforts towards priorities outlined in the roadmap and tactical recommendations.
We believe in the SPE model, which is why we ourselves want to use it(!), but it’s important to also be clear that many current contributing groups do not operate in line with the intention of how SPEs were designed and passed in LIP 90.
Through our coordination role we will aim to simplify this practice for them and help them become more like SPEs who can take on scopes of work and route funds and activity to ship fast for the ecosystem.
(3) More Clarity Around Process & Transparency
We include the following details to promote further transparency and ensure process and improvements are clear, as these questions were asked during the first iteration:
- RFPs will be public and transparent, with clearly defined scopes and selection criteria. The Foundation will act as the decision making body, with input from Advisory Boards where relevant. We will share decisions and all reasoning with the community
- The Foundation will not vote on its own proposals. The Foundation will utilise its delegation to vote only: (a) in instances where it serves to protect the network such as in the case of an attack; or (b) for an important vote to reach quorum.
- The Transformation SPE will provide regular public reporting and accounting, and will make it easy for any community member or voter to track progress and delivery
(4) A Reduced Scope and Budget realignment
The revised proposal requests 44,500LPT (approximately 290,000 USD). This is just 35% of the original ask of 119,000LPT / 800,000 USD. But we believe we will deliver much more than 50% of the value included in the original proposal. So not just a reduction in budget, but more impact per $/LPT spent.
The budget still covers a four-month period with all deliverables executed within that timeframe.
Pre-Proposal - Creating the Transformation SPE
Mission
Livepeer Foundation proposes creation of the “Transformation SPE”. Its mission is to deliver on a reduced set of workstreams as part of a ‘Surge’ strategy that attracts builders, deploys capital, and coordinates an increased set of contributors to development of priority technology and features.
It asks for a budget of $290,000 which equates to 44,500LPT (at current prices) to deploy towards talent and development costs for executing the workstreams
Rationale
The Livepeer Foundation was created with the intention to help strategically allocate capital, coordinate core network development, and attract new builders and contributors to grow the ecosystem. We believe we make important steps to delivering on this role through the scope of this proposal.
Using the SPE model, as it was originally intended, creates a step change in the way that the ecosystem allocates capital, attracts talent, acts transparently and is accountable to milestones, and allows the ecosystem to surge through rapid delivery over the coming months.
Key Terms
Surge: Our strategy to create momentum for the ecosystem through increased urgency, prioritisation and coordination
Transformation SPE: A vehicle funded by the onchain treasury and stewarded by the Livepeer Foundation to increase ecosystem contributions that deliver on priorities
RFP: A new mechanism underneath the Transformation SPE, which acts as an open process to attract, retain and price contributions that deliver on the Surge strategy
SPE Governance Structure
- The Transformation SPE will be stewarded by the Livepeer Foundation. It will work with the Advisory Boards as needed to continue to represent all stakeholders of the ecosystem to the best of its ability.
- It will deliver on the recommendations of the Advisory Boards through the scope of work outlined in the proposal.
- Each workstream will have a Workstream Lead, who is accountable for delivery of the workstream scope and has decision making authority over its budget.
- It will deliver those recommendations at or within its budget.
- It will allocate those funds in a fair and transparent manner. Fair, where possible, will be to run open and transparent RFP processes for teams to complete work. Transparent, will be to share monthly accounting records for the flow of funds to contributors, as well as quarterly Transparency Reports which review progress against milestones, deliverables and timelines.
- To be clear, the Transformation SPE routes all funds to contributors for delivery of services.
- The SPE will hold its budgeted assets in a secure multisig SAFE with a threshold of known individuals as signers.
Deliverables
The detailed scope of work for the three workstreams including budgets, milestones and deliverables can be found here: Livepeer Project Workstreams [UPDATED]
What we will deliver in this proposal will be broken down by workstream:
Capital Workstream
- Create a Capital Management working group.
- Make a proposal to increase DEX liquidity for LPT pairs on Arbitrum.
- Make a proposal to adjust inflation for long term health.
- Make a proposal to keep/adjust the treasury cap and start accumulating LPT back into the treasury.
- Actively manage capital to fund ecosystem operations and reduce risk.
Further details on goals and requirements of the Capital Workstream here.
Builders Workstream
- Creating a new ecosystem development team focused on onboarding & supporting new builders.
- Launch a new knowledge hub on the website to easy onboarding and technical support.
- Launch several key integrations with leading adjacent projects (e.g. Base, Zora, Eliza). within the GTM bets (e.g. open social or agent frameworks)
- Seed the ecosystem with pre-packaged grant ideas and potential startups in video & real-time AI.
- Activate and connect with an IRL builder community during a major activation at ETH Devconnect.
- Scope a funding mechanism to scale and accelerate promising projects with large ambitions.
Further details on goals and requirements of the Builders Workstream here.
Development Workstream
- Create a new core contributor coordination function & hub.
- Make a proposal to seed and structure a Protocol Development SPE.
- Make critical explorer improvements (via RFP).
- Publish initial core video primitives alignment spec.
- Steward payments clearinghouse roadmap & prototype with local SDK.
Further details on goals and requirements of the Development Workstream here.
Budget
The role of the Livepeer Foundation is to help align strategy across the ecosystem, support continued ecosystem growth and continual development of the ecosystem and protocol.
No funding from this SPE goes to core Foundation team members or the Foundation itself.
The Foundation will use the SPE structure to quickly allocate funds and attract contributors and to leverage one of Livepeers core assets - the community, their talents and their extended networks. All funds are custodied onchain and distributed to contributors for completion of work.
FAQs
We have included a full FAQ section in our supplementary Notion page here.
