There’s been lots of discussion in the Discord #delegating channel this week around staking, the role of Livepeer Inc, opportunities for nodes to compete and be rewarded accordingly, etc. Here are a few high level opportunities I see…
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Ideally stake would move MUCH more frequently and quickly, according to how nodes are contributing to the overall success of Livepeer or change their own parameters/earnings/performance.
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This requires better “UX” for delegators (including both independent single-account delegators, bigger entities like Livepeer Inc, large institutional delegators or staking operators, etc). What are some UX opportunities?
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Performance visibility - what capabilities are nodes offering, in what regions, how are they performing, at what scale, and how are they earning as a result? The new AI performance leaderboard coming soon should help with this a bit.
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Economics monitoring - When do nodes change their reward cut or fee cut params? When do they start and stop earning ETH fees? Have they missed reward calls? The telegram bot certainly can help with this.
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Multi-delegation management - Many delegators want to diversify and support many nodes. But the UX for this is abysmal because at the moment you can only stake towards one node from one account, queuing and signing multisig txns is a grueling process with no Livepeer-native UX. Deep protocol changes would be required to address the multi-staking, but lots of opportunities are available at the user interface level to better have visiblity into and manage stake across multiple accounts from one dashboard.
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Awareness - Don’t underestimate the value of a little campaigning. I encourage node operators to make forum posts and continue sharing highlights in their threads of how they’re contributing to the ecosystem. While data is certainly available on chain and in the explorer, it’s hard to proactively parse through grids of numbers and scores that don’t have any time-based history attached, and convert them into staking actions. Are there better opportunities or UX’s to raise awareness of newly participating and high performing nodes? Titan Node’s old “node operator startup program” comes to mind.
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Access for node operators - There’s been a lot of discussion about raising the limit on node operators beyond 100 to lower the barrier for how much stake is required to join the network. Of course there are potential drawbacks, but the main steps that would need to be taken here are pretty straightforward. 1) Do the quick research and presentation to understand the impact on Gateway deposit requirements. 2) Consider whether or not to introduce Gateway/Orchestrator node config options to let nodes ignore those requirements by default or not. 3) Consider any UX changes to tools that are needed that assume 100 O’s (there may not be any changes required). 4) Make a parameter change LIP proposal.
Ultimately, the role of delegators in Livepeer’s design is meant to be effective at helping the network by quality assuring that high performing nodes are active, have stake, and are appropriately rewarded and funding. One way to do this is by activating high performing, but low stake nodes, onto the network. High performing/low stake nodes earn outsized fees relative to their stake, so rational delegators would move stake towards them. Over time they’d attract more stake, generate more income from their reward cut, and build up their own stakes. Delegators may seek out better economic opportunities by moving stake towards newer, high performing, low stake nodes. The cycle repeats. Doing this requires a really good UX and really good awareness tools, like some mentioned above and more.
These tools are ultimately public goods for the network. The explorer, which serves as the main tool, is a pretty complex piece of software. It gets frequent maintenance, but hasn’t had a dedicated team proactively working to improve it in service of the above delegator experience. We have a framework for using public goods funding through the Livepeer treasury to fix this, and a new “GovWorks” group, working on better facilitating the formation of SPEs and accessing funding to take on these public goods initiatives. So it seems like there’s a clear opportunity here to leverage funding to marshal a committed group to making sure delegation is helping the network achieve success.