Streamplace 2.0: Solving Video for Everybody Forever

Treasury
1

EDIT: Updated proposal later in the thread.

Hey everyone. I’ve been tinkering with this draft all week but just wanted to get it out there ASAP to kick off the process. For more context, check out my presentation to the treasury last Monday - Part 1 and Part 2.

STREAMPLACE 2.0: SOLVING VIDEO FOR EVERYBODY FOREVER

Summary

We’re requesting 250,000 LPT to continue building the video layer for the next generation of decentralized social. In less than a year, Streamplace (née Aquareum) has evolved from a concept to a functional platform powering thousands of hours of livestreaming, securing partnership with Skylight (a TikTok alternative that reached #1 in entertainment on the App Store), and establishing itself as the go-to solution for live video on the AT Protocol.

The Livepeer treasury made all of that happen, and we’re thrilled to be continuing to fund the project as a shared public good. With your support, we’ll expand our infrastructure, hire specialized talent, enhance moderation capabilities, deepen AT Protocol integration, develop VOD functionality, and explore monetization options—all while maintaining our commitment to open-source development and building public infrastructure.

What We’ve Accomplished

Technical Achievements

  • The Protocol: Streamplace has invented a novel form of decentralized livestreaming. Our technique, utilizing C2PA-powered Ethereum signatures over one-second MP4 files, is both cryptographically secure and easy to work with.
  • The Node: The Streamplace node runs on all major platforms — Windows, macOS, and Linux, and supports AMD and ARM64 architectures. The node is a single file - deployment is the easiest thing in the world. It’s available for download at Streamplace!
  • The App: We shipped the Streamplace mobile app to the App Store and Play Store; Streamplace Desktop is also available for download on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Grab it at https://app.stream.place!
  • Implemented WHIP and WHEP protocols The Streamplace node utilizes WebRTC for the entire stack — this makes it super easy to support streaming from browsers and phones while delivering low-latency video playback for viewers.
  • Libraries: We shipped c2pa-go, the first library for using C2PA primitives in Go. We implemented Ethereum key support in c2pa-rs and shipped the first library for AT Protocol Oauth using React Native, which is in production in multiple atproto applications.
  • Livepeer transcoding: All streams through stream.place are transcoded on the Livepeer network, establishing LIvepeer as a key component in the next generation of decentralized social.

Community & Market Traction

  • Sponsored ATmosphereConf livestreaming - Streamplace sponsored the first ATmosphereConf; we both operated the livestream and produced the stream on-site. It went really, really well!
  • As a direct consequence, we were featured in TechCrunch as a part of a roundup of next-generation apps building on atproto — we were all by ourselves in the livestreaming category!
  • Skylight Social partnership - Also as a direct consequence of the conference, we’re bringing livestreaming to Skylight Social, a Mark Cuban-backed TikTok alternative that recently reached #1 in entertainment and #7 overall on the iOS App Store. Skylight surpassed 150,000 users in the first three days after launch and users are consistently pinging their team asking to go live. As soon as this feature ships, all of this livestreaming will be going through the Livepeer network!
  • Established ownership of the live video niche on the AT Protocol. Not only that, but Streamplace will be one of the earliest projects to launch significant video content outside of Bluesky’s infrastructure, contributing to the decentralization of the protocol.

All of this has been achieved while keeping every single line of code open-source and freely licensed.

The Opportunity

We’re at a critical inflection point. We’ve proven the concept works, secured key partnerships, and demonstrated clear product-market fit. Rather than pursuing venture capital with its inherent pressure toward extractive business models, we’re seeking continued support from the Livepeer treasury to pioneer a new public goods funding model—one focused on solving hard technical problems for the benefit of an entire ecosystem.

Funding Allocation (250,000 LPT)

Team Expansion

We need to bring on more people full-time to actually deliver on this dream; to start off we’ll be hiring a designer/front-end engineer and a video expert for hardening the node. Additionally, we’re planning on contracting out bounties and collaborating with other projects in the ATProto and Livepeer ecosystems on projects like code generation and SDK development to start to make Streamplace technology as accessible as possible.

Infrastructure Enhancement

  • Servers and Scaling: It’s imperative that we deliver a great first impression to this community, and that means scaling up to handle demand and expanding our server infrastructure.
  • Performance Hardening: Veterans of Livepeer Studio know there’s a huge gulf between something that mostly works and a battle-hardened piece of video infrastructure. It’s imperative that we deliver a great first impression; decentralized social needs to work at least as well as existing.
  • Reliability Testing: Ensure consistent performance under varying network conditions

Core Technology Development

  • AT Protocol Integration: Develop deeper, more native integration with AT Protocol. Currently the integration is relatively shallow; a signing key on a users’ PDS links the two accounts. We’re aiming to assist in the development of the protocol.
  • NPM Packages: Streamplace has been architected from the ground up to be embeddable in other apps but we haven’t yet actually shipped this capability. With the Skylight partnership we’ll be building out the capabilities to embed broadcast and playback within other apps and websites; other atproto apps have also expressed interest.
  • Clipping and VOD: Build decentralized video-on-demand capabilities (beyond Bluesky’s current 3-minute limit)
  • Transcoding Infrastructure: Support increased transcoding demand from Skylight users via Livepeer Network

Trust & Safety

  • Moderation Systems: As part of the Skylight launch, we will be building out a full content moderation infrastructure, utilizing AI models backed with human moderators. This kind of thing isn’t always emphasized in the Web3 space, but it’s essential to comply with mass market adoption.
  • Community Standards: We plan on developing transparent guidelines aligned with decentralized values.

Growth & Sustainability

  • Stream Incentives: Programs to encourage creators to use the platform
  • Monetization Framework: Explore micropayment systems and creator revenue models in collaboration with others in the atproto space.
  • Custom App Development: Our pitch to big Twitch streamers isn’t “switch from Twitch to Streamplace,” it’s “switch from Twitch to your own app, powered by Streamplace infrastructure.” This facilitates a direct relationship between creators and their fans, while the Streamplace layer still enables all the social features of a rich livestreaming platform - chat, hosting, and such.

Vision

We’re not just building a livestreaming platform—we’re establishing the infrastructure and primitives for an entire generation of video applications on decentralized social networks. Our ultimate goal remains unchanged: solving video for everybody, forever.

With your continued support, we can create something truly revolutionary: a creator-sovereign, open-source video layer that enables experiences on par with centralized platforms but aligned with the values of decentralization.

Thank you for considering this proposal. Let’s continue building the future of decentralized video together.

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2

Wow, I didn’t have the slightest idea that this had achieved so much. You guys seem to be on the cusp of taking this to next level, mainstream level even..
I’d give you whatever you need. If you say it’ll take 1 million dollars, then 1 million it is. Congratulations, thank you and good luck!

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I’ve been following Eli’s journey since day one, and this feels like a major turning point. He’s successfully secured a first-mover advantage, and while $1 million might seem like much, the potential for concurrent streams it could unlock for the network is massive.

I’m genuinely excited—I’ve learned a ton from the development streams. This isn’t just about driving demand; it could fundamentally reshape the gateway layer by distributing traffic away from a single point of failure. Self-hosted streamers evolving into revenue-generating gateways is a true game-changer.

Compared to the current studio setup, which relies on a single centralized gateway, this opens the door to a fully decentralized ecosystem. We’ve already decentralized the orchestrators—now, we’re on the verge of doing the same with the gateways. That’s huge.

It really feels like the missing puzzle piece. With this in place, other SPEs can now integrate more seamlessly, paving the way for natural symbiosis. AI agents, Daydream, and similar projects could thrive in this kind of environment. Stream Place could become the gravitational center of the video world, with other SPEs orbiting around it, each adding unique value to a dynamic, decentralized network.

I’ll admit—I didn’t fully grasp Eli’s vision at first. But the more I tinkered with the idea and watched it unfold, the more it clicked. And now, it makes total sense. This is super huge.

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Also, not that it appears to need it, but if Tiktok does get banned in the US, that Mark Cuban backed TikTok alternative, which you say has already 150k users, will explode. This is unbelievable.

Are you guys ready to scale? Is Livepeer ready for that kinda traffic? I can’t believe this is happenning :rofl:

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Hi @iameli,

Awesome to Streamplace move to the next stage: super excited to see what will be built and the team you would build out. The progress that youve made has been immense :fire: The opportunity with Skylight looks amazing. (Though I would question product market fit being reached before the app has even gone into production.)

My question to the community: is this the sort of precendent that we want to set? 1/3 of the treasury set on private enterprise in one proposal.

To be clear: I am not going against the integrity of @iameli: I have full faith that you are set to become one of the key applications for the ecosystem as a whole! :raising_hands:

But this is setting a precedent for the amount asked for that other people will quickly follow. My recommendation for this proposal is: split it up into two (even three) chunks to reduce the pressure on this decision.

Why does it need to be all in one go? It makes sense from an agnel / venture capital perspective, because of the contracts that are set in place between investor / founder. But there would be no such contract in place here, which makes the “investment” from the community incredible risky.

I feel this is unnecessary at this stage and a lot can happen in a week within a startup let alone 1 year e.g. Skylight launch flops, takes longer to attract talent, run into serious dev roadblocks.

80k-120k LPT would still be 3x the size of the largest previous proposal and set a precendent in and of itself. But at least it would be a more manageable precedent and be given to someone who has high trust in the community.

Whichever way you decide and the community votes, its a super exciting proposal. I would love to catch up soon to hear more about activating the bounty program and helping you attract talent / build out marketing / GTM. :man_bowing:

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People have asked for what equaled to 500k dollars before. And given what’s been achieved here and the goals, twice of that is not much imo. But I figure this is coming from Inc. so whatever they say is likely gonna happen. But please let’s not make things so beuracratic that it slows Streamplace down.

I should say, this is the most I was excited about Livepeer since Ai on Livepeer was first announced almost 17 months ago! I mean it’s Marc Cuban, man. His app is not gonna flop. This is the closest Livepeer ever got to being remotely mainstream.

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As previously mentioned, I trust in the integrity of Iameli and I am very excited to see their project come to fruition.

I am not sure that financing the project at such a level all at once is useful or fair.
I think that 1/3 or 1/4 of the amount at first should be enough to pay new collaborators and fund the project.

I would rather finance a portion of the request initially to see how the project evolves and then continue funding as it progresses positively.

I do not want to set a precedent and see numerous SPE requests for exorbitant amounts, only to later witness the funds simply disappear along with the project and its creators.

In any case, congratulations on the work already accomplished, and I’m eager to see what comes next.

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@obodur I agree with this. Maintaining speed is key. However, with any pre-seed / seed venture, maintaining good relations with investors by giving monthly investor updates / overviews is more key. Shipping = production code + users + published learnings.

In regards to speed + fundraising: after a Founder has published 6 concise but informative investor updates in 6 months, they can raise a bridge or follow-on round almost instantly without preparing a huge deck. Why? Because the investors have been clearly informed of progress and don’t need additional context to wire over some more cash.

I would recommend the same principal here for @iameli: ship code + get first users (or integration) live + communicate learnings monthly. Then when you need more LPT in 6 months, it will be very easy to get that LPT :+1:

(Just for transparency on my views: these thoughts are purely my own and no one else at Inc was consulted before I put these views forward. Before Livepeer, I worked with PL Ventures (the investment arm of Protocol Labs which created IPFS / Filecoin) on the platform side of the accelerator team which operated a portfolio of about 200 seed investments, partnering with leading accelerators in the web3 space. :folded_hands: )

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Thanks for the frank feedback, Rich. These are fair concerns and I’ll absolutely let the community weigh in, but let me substantiate one piece a bit:

Why does it need to be all in one go? It makes sense from an agnel / venture capital perspective, because of the contracts that are set in place between investor / founder.

The reason for the large ask is that the project needs to hire multiple experienced, talented people full-time - the kind of work that needs to happen requires that kind of attention. We’re at a crucial stage where we need to make some foundational architectural decisions, such as the the details of the signed-segment protocol, the moderation mechanisms, and the structure of the embeddable, multi-platform frontend. These sorts of things will absolutely define the project for years to come. The next few months are crucial and we need people that can dedicate their full attentions to it.

There are a lot of talented people who would be a lot more comfortable making that jump, potentially leaving other positions, knowing that Streamplace had the resources to keep them employed for a while. Their continued employment being contingent on support from a crypto treasury that they may well never have heard of is unappealing.

But there would be no such contract in place here, which makes the “investment” from the community incredible risky.

Well, certainly, let’s make one! Over in Discord we’re already talking about splitting up the amount in Titan’s streaming token contract to dole out the tokens over time and avoid creating excessive sell pressure. If we add into that a group of appointed guardians acceptable to the community, there’s perhaps a middle-ground solution here? The funds get locked up, providing some reassurance to folks joining the Streamplace team. But if our team vanishes, the funds can be returned to the treasury. Open to a solution along those lines?

1 Like
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Congrats @iameli, those are huge achievements!

There’s a lot to learn and unpack here, but I’ll start with a few questions that came to mind regarding Skylight:

  • Is there some sort of contract with Skylight or is this just based on a loose verbal agreement?
  • Is the Skylight traffic routed through Streamplace hosted gateways (similar to Livepeer Studio) or will Skylight host them?
  • Have there been talks regarding the pricing of the transcoding?
  • How is the content delivery handled? Has Streamplace some sort of native CDN?
  • Is there a rough timeline for the Skylight launch? E.g. planned testsruns?

Again, this is some really exciting process. I’m just trying to grasp how close Streamplace actually is to substantially increase the demand side.

And some questions regarding your business/funding approach:

  • Will Streamplace eventually be a for-profit company? And if so, do you already have a business plan?
  • What would be your approach regarding price risk of LPT? We’ve seen $25 to $3.50 within the last year, how can you make sure that Streamplace has the required resources under those circumstances?
  • Have you considered other funding approaches such as e.g. Ethereum foundation grants, Gitcoin, Arbitrum grants etc.?
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Thanks, Vires! Excellent questions.

  • Is there some sort of contract with Skylight or is this just based on a loose verbal agreement?

We haven’t signed anything but the collaboration is much closer than “yes on a phone call” - I’m going every week to work in-person with their team, we’ve already started planning and building moderation systems together, and Tori their CEO has announced the collaboration every time someone asks. It’s happening. I’m sure they’d be open to signing a contract but Streamplace is going to subsidize the transcoding and distribution costs for the initial stage of the integration so I’m not sure what a contract would be enforcing.

  • Is the Skylight traffic routed through Streamplace hosted gateways (similar to Livepeer Studio) or will Skylight host them?

Streamplace will be hosting the initial gateways but that could easily change in the future. We’ve made it an extremely high priority to maximize self-hostability, especially when compared with Studio – this is me trying not to repeat my own mistakes in the past. The node is a single-file binary and it’s mostly stateless - data is stored in a users’ atproto PDS (atproto’s equivalent of “on-chain”).

  • Have there been talks regarding the pricing of the transcoding?

Here’s what I’m using right now, off of a recommendation from @Karolak :

      LP_MAXTOTALEV: "100000000000000000000"
      LP_PRICEPERUNIT: "4.72USD"
      LP_MAXPRICEPERUNIT: "5USD"
      LP_PIXELSPERUNIT: "1e13"

Totally open to discussion on that, haven’t put much thought into the exact specifics of pricing yet. Skylight streams will mostly be from phones, probably 720p to start out. There may also be some gamers that want to multistream via Streamplace instead but have their livestreams show up on Skylight, so those would probably be 1080p, though we’ve started to see a bit of 1440p and 4k as well. Here are the automatic renditions - those adjust automatically to only use renditions <= the users’ livestream.

  • How is the content delivery handled? Has Streamplace some sort of native CDN?

Yep, that’s the basic idea; Streamplace nodes replicate the signed segments between them and then serve them out to users. We’re 90% on WebRTC right now for playback, with an HLS fallback. I’ve been really happy with the performance of WebRTC so far, but I will flag that one consequence there is that we’re not “end-to-end trustless” at the moment; WebRTC is lossy and so couldn’t be used for signature verification. So we have trustless replication between Streamplace nodes but users have to trust their Streamplace node to actually play back the stream. If that matters to a user, they can run Streamplace Desktop and play back from their local node!

  • Is there a rough timeline for the Skylight launch? E.g. planned testsruns?

“Within the next couple of months” is what we’ve been saying. The biggest remaining gap is the moderation infrastructure. Skylight is planning on doing an invite-only beta for the first group of users before flipping on livestreaming for everyone.

  • Will Streamplace eventually be a for-profit company? And if so, do you already have a business plan?

For transparency: Aquareum Inc. d.b.a. Streamplace is a Delaware for-profit C-Corp that I set up through Stripe Atlas. There’s not any particular reason we’re structured that way except we needed a business entity, Atlas was an easy way to do that, and those are the default settings. I’m open to revisiting that structure – Bluesky and Skylight are both “Public Benefit Corporations” which is like a middle ground between a for-profit and a nonprofit. So maybe we’ll do something like that.

I don’t have formal business plan that I’m following right now, but I’ve kicked around a couple of ideas. One relates to the “Custom App Development” line in the proposal - we’d maintain the open-source Streamplace foundation and infrastructure, and influencers and celebrities would contract with us to maintain bespoke apps built on top of that foundation. I don’t know if that’s realistic but it would be awesome.

Probably the bigger-money approach would be to build a decentralized advertising marketplace that facilitates a direct relationship between advertisers and content creators while also paying for very expensive global livestreaming infrastructure. But our plans for such a thing aren’t much more extensive than that one sentence.

  • What would be your approach regarding price risk of LPT? We’ve seen $25 to $3.50 within the last year, how can you make sure that Streamplace has the required resources under those circumstances?

Good question. I based my ask off the current price and what we need to move forward. If this proposal failed or LPT became worthless then I’d start looking at other forms of funding.

  • Have you considered other funding approaches such as e.g. Ethereum foundation grants, Gitcoin, Arbitrum grants etc.?

I’d take recommendations if you think there’s a good fit! I came to y’all first because you were good enough to approve our first proposal, and we’re more on the “demand side” of the video equation so I wasn’t sure if it’s the kind of thing other treasuries would be interested in.

3 Likes
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Thanks for putting this proposal forward, @iameli. It’s really exciting to see how much progress Streamplace/Aquareum has made in such a short time, and big congrats on the Skylight partnership.

The roundup of achievements is quite insightful and impressive, but since this proposal builds on a previous funding round, it would be helpful for the community to see a more detailed report of what was achieved with the initial grant. This helps frame what’s possible with this next phase and aligns expectations on outcomes.

There are also a few areas where the proposal would benefit from more detail and structure as outlined in the recommended Proposal Template that can be found in the GovHub:

  1. What’s the expected timeline for this tranche of funding? Are there specific deliverables or checkpoints the community should look for over the next 3, 6, 12 months? What indicators would suggest the project isn’t progressing as planned, and how might that be addressed? A milestone-based framework (with optional clawback terms or pause conditions for the proposed streaming contract) would likely give contributors and community members more confidence, and GovWorks is happy to act as contract guardian in this case alongside other community members.
  1. Could you break down how you arrived at the 250,000 LPT figure? How much is allocated to team salaries, infrastructure, growth, or contingency/volatility buffer? If this is still TBD, estimates would suffice. Which parts of the build are time-sensitive and which could be phased with future proposals? How will use of funds be governed internally?
  2. Given the size of this ask and the precedent it could set, as others have mentioned, it’s important to define how transparency will be maintained. Can you commit to monthly or quarterly updates? Will progress be made visible via a dashboard, public repo activity, or milestone tracker?

We’re aligned with many in the community who feel Streamplace has earned a high degree of trust, and we agree this momentum shouldn’t be slowed down by excessive bureaucracy. That said, we’ve also seen examples from past SPEs where limited structure & information around milestones and fund utilization made it difficult to evaluate impact or ensure accountability. This proposal is an opportunity to lead by example and set a high standard for transparency without compromising on speed. Looking forward to your responses!

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First off, congratulations to the Streamplace team on their work so far! I’ve known @iameli for years and have nothing but positive things to say about his technical talent, integrity, and commitment to the Livepeer mission.

While I do believe that Streamplace can be an important part of the Livepeer ecosystem and should receive funding, it is difficult to assess the merits of this proposal without clear data around the impact generated from Streamplace’s first proposal.

First, I have concerns about the precedent we are setting as a community. Streamplace’s technical achievements are undoubtedly impressive - but in my opinion we should be assessing based on demonstrated impact not output when allocating funds for an SPE’s second proposal.

For example, we shouldn’t assume that a public good has value simply because it exists; we should impute its value from adoption. For example, the impact of the AI SPE, LLM SPE, and Cloud SPE can be clearly measured in fees on the network and usage of tooling.

Second, partnerships are exciting, but they don’t always work out as expected and on their own they are not indications of traction; this request for funding assumes a growth curve and is effectively asking the treasury to provide risk capital. There are a lot of unanswered questions here.

To help the community gain more comfort with the proposal, it would be helpful if Streamplace could answer:

  • What fees have been generated through use of their node?
  • Which applications have integrated their capabilities?
  • What percent of this treasury proposal is actually paying to subsidize streaming on Skylight?
  • What happens if Skylight changes course?
  • Are there any quantitative indications of product-market fit?
  • Is anyone else running the node?
  • Is there any adoption by independent streamers? If so, how many?

Based on what I’ve seen so far (open to updating my opinion based on new data), my personal recommendation is that Streamplace submit an interim proposal to ensure they can stay solvent while the Skylight partnership plays out, and come back to the community with a larger request when they are able to clearly and quantitatively demonstrate that they’ve delivered impact for the Livepeer Network.

TLDR; to evaluate this followup proposal, I think we need more data.

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Thanks for the feedback, Nneoma and Hunter. I’ll go through these points more thoroughly tomorrow morning to propose some changes and add some additional substance to the proposal. Just one quick callout:

I hope transparency is the one area where we’d be at consensus! Since I started full-time after the first proposal I’ve been livestreaming nearly every day (get the app for notifications) and every line of code has been open-source and available on git.stream.place and GitHub. Our only major expenses outside of Streamplace personnel and infrastructure were our event sponsorships for nwHacks and ATmosphereConf, and I presented to the community about both of those events in Treasury Talks.

Nevertheless, we’ve been making some changes to increase visibility like moving to GitHub from our self-hosted GitLab instance to make life easy for the first round of external contributors. And we’ve started to get bugs and features listed out in a GitHub board to further increase visibility. I’m happy to write more quarterly reports if they’d make folks more comfortable, but if there’s anything you want to know just stop by the stream and ask!

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Thanks everyone for the support and candid feedback - really appreciate how many people weighed in! Between public conversations and DMs I’ve had discussions with ~20 people at this point. Here’s where I’ve landed:

  1. Continuation: 100,000 LPT. This proposal will go up on-chain before the end of today’s round. At current LPT prices this represents around $389,000, very similar to our previous round which ended up being around $360,000. My read is that there’s reasonably broad support for keeping Streamplace operational at around this amount, and while I’m happy to continue to answer questions through the voting period I don’t see any virtue in delaying much past this point. This will give us enough runway to kick off the hiring process and onboard our new team.

  2. Onward: 150,000 LPT. This will go to Titan’s streaming contract and be distributed over perhaps a year, with trusted guardians appointed from the community — we’ve already had a few folks express interest. Before this goes live we’ll be able to substantiate the proposal a bit and share details of the newly-expanded Streamplace team. While I continue to think we’ll need the full amount to continue delivering on the vision, hopefully the two-proposal approach can reduce risk enough that everyone’s comfortable moving foward.

Thank you all!

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Proposal 1 is live and pending! :partying_face:

Responding to a few more specific points.

I agree with that assessment; I have less immediate network usage to show and am asking for support based on the upside potential. That being said, the upside isn’t based on the Skylight partnership, that upside is based on us establishing ourselves as the go-to and obvious live video solution for the AT Protocol, which is already the world’s largest decentralized social network.

We’ve had the integration in Streamplace turned on for a couple of weeks now but it doesn’t look like any tickets have yet paid out if I’m using this subgraph query correctly:

query MyQuery {
  winningTicketRedeemedEvents(
    where: {sender: "0x173173b30b5d3c8f09ee78816da8a6402d6b16e1"}
  ) {
    id
    sender {
      id
      reserve
      deposit
    }
  }
}

We’re building out that integration now with Skylight but Spark has already expressed an interest as well - they’re another TikTok-on-atproto clone. If Skylight defies their users and decides lives aren’t important we’ll focus on every other app in the ecosystem, I suppose.

Skylight and Bluesky certainly have it, with 200,000 and 35,000,000 users respectively. If we have fit for TikTok-on-atproto and Twitter-on-atproto, my thesis is that Twitch-on-atproto is a solid bet as well. But we won’t find out without support.

I know other folks have booted it up but I haven’t seen streams in action yet. Copying these usage numbers from Discord:

Analytics are a little more scarce; we only really opened up to users at the start of this year, and the transcoding integration only came in the last month. We’ve had 63 unique users stream on the platform to date and maxed out at about 350 concurrent viewers when we were airing ATmosphereConf - more during load testing, naturally.

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I really appreciate the ambition and potential behind Streamplace to grow the Livepeer ecosystem. As someone who has benefited from previous funding myself, I value innovative builders who drive adoption and technical progress. However, I’m concerned that the size of this ask—over $1M total—may be too large given the current traction. It’s crucial that any investment on this scale has a clear path to delivering tangible returns back to Livepeer, whether that’s usage, development, or ecosystem-wide visibility.

Here are my main concerns:

  1. Technical Impact & Adoption
    While the project has done some interesting work, I haven’t seen clear signals of major adoption or visibility leading back to Livepeer. For instance, the code repositories don’t prominently credit Livepeer or show strong community engagement (stars, forks, issues, etc.).
  2. Mark Cuban’s Interest
    Having a high-profile party interested in moderation and streaming features is exciting, but it doesn’t automatically guarantee usage or PMF for Livepeer. I’d love to see a formal plan showing how this partnership creates demand for Livepeer.
  3. Value Beyond “More Transcoding”
    Simply saying transcoding will increase isn’t enough of a return. We need specific usage metrics, agreements, or terms that guarantee sustainable benefits, rather than just theoretical throughput.
  4. Tie-Back Into Livepeer
    Even if the project is open-source, it’s not obvious how the code directly benefits or improves Livepeer. More clarity here—like reusable libraries, direct contributions, or integrations—would help me see the longer-term upside.
  5. Scope & Budget Alignment
    The proposal covers a wide range of tasks (moderation, AT Protocol improvements, scaling, performance testing, etc.) that may be too broad to accomplish effectively under a single $1M budget. More focus and prioritization would be ideal.
  6. Long-Term Funding Concerns
    $1M can disappear quickly for a tech team looking to hire multiple engineers. There’s a risk of running low on funds before substantial progress or ecosystem returns can materialize.

In short, I’m not ready to support the request in its current form. I could be convinced if the proposal were more focused, with a smaller ask, clearer deliverables, realistic timelines, and formal commitments. Most importantly, there needs to be an explicit plan for how these efforts directly strengthen Livepeer. Funding builders is essential, but we must ensure it aligns with the community’s broader vision for growth and sustainability.

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19

I’d love to see how much fees cloud spe brought to the network considering it received $200k funding. And I still can not see very expensive livepeer ai tester implemented on the explorer. I can make a bet that Fees brought / dollar invested stat will be higher for streamplace where it is just starting to get traction while cloud spe integration stalled. If it can only make 5% of current skylight users create a stream it will be enough to bring more revenue than cloud spe.

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Thanks for engaging, but let’s keep it focused on facts.

Clarifying the Cloud SPE / AI‑Tester history

What was promised What was delivered
Public code + reference integration, not fee growth All code published on Github; Tester deployed and operating to this day; Inc. chose not to deploy the needed parts on their end. To mitigate, we developed an independent performance leaderboard beyond the scope of the proposal so the metrics are available to all as intended.

So Cloud SPE’s deliverables here were infrastructure and transparency tooling, not fee generation. That’s why comparing “fees per dollar” doesn’t really map one‑to‑one.

How this relates to Streamplace

  • I’m not saying Streamplace can’t outperform Cloud SPE on fees; I sure hope it does since the Cloud SPE is built for the development community.
  • My critique is that, at a $1 M ask, we need concrete usage targets, milestone‑based payouts, and a crystal‑clear path linking their growth to Livepeer’s.
  • If Streamplace can hit those metrics—great, let’s fund it. If not, we should scale the request to match provable traction.

Path forward

I’d love to see Streamplace come back with:

  1. Usage commitments (e.g., X streaming hours, Y monthly broadcasters).
  2. Formal partnership terms with Skylight that guarantee Livepeer usage.
  3. Milestone‑based funding tranches so LPT is unlocked only when goals are met.

That would make it easy for all of us—regardless of past projects—to say yes with confidence and keep the discussion about data, not personalities.

Hope this clarifies where I’m coming from and keeps the conversation productive.

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Thanks speedybird!

That’s on me - we were doing development entirely on our own GitLab until recently with GitHub just being a mirror. We migrated that this week and we’ll hopefully be able to drive a bit more attention onto the GitHub repo.

You’re absolutely right that the README should credit Livepeer, I’ll take care of that on-stream today.

I can’t guarantee to you usage metrics on a feature that doesn’t exist yet. If 5% of Skylight’s 200,000ish users stream for 2 hours 4 times a week, that’d be 4,800,000 streaming minutes in a week, which would more than double transcoding usage for the most recent week. So that’s the ballpark; I could be wrong about any of that. I’ll talk to their team and see if I can get any better estimates, but they’d be guessing too. We just don’t know. There’s nobody that can make you that guarantee.

That’s if things continue as they are. The TikTok ban actually going through would be a black swan event; there’s zero precedent for an app with 30 million daily active users (in the US) ceasing to exist overnight. 100x that usage? Literally no idea. I’m myself skeptical it’ll happen but even the possibility is driving our urgency on the matter.

Mixed feelings here. On the one hand: I am frustrated that I haven’t been able to deliver on the “go-livepeer as a library” project. I’ll probably try and get it done in the next few days – most of the work has already been done (the C code integrations) but we’ve had red-hot high priority bugs, blocking people from using the platform, to take care of in the meantime. But if we can make this happen it’ll be big and useful.

On the other hand: I wrote a longish proposal for upgrading the network to use embedded C2PA signatures like Streamplace does and it hasn’t really gone anywhere, unfortunately. I think the potential here is huge for verification and user-sovereignty; the metadata within these files would allow users to define where and when their livestreams can be distributed over decentralized servers, for example. These are the sorts of primitives that could establish us as THE authority in decentralized social video.

If the community isn’t interested in that kind of thing – it’s not really AI-related – that’s fine, no hard feelings, I can look for funding elsewhere. But I think the opportunity to the the bedrock of decentralized media processing is massive.

I can’t offer 1. I can guess but I can’t make a commitment. The smaller proposal that’s live starts to address 3 - certainly we’d outline the specific goals to unlock future funding. For 2, would you accept a letter of intent with their team? I don’t know what the enforcement mechanism would be for a contract but they’d be happy to guarantee that we’re shipping the feature.

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