Hey Livepeer Community,
Dillon, Drew, and Raymond here from Commonwealth, a project to build governance systems for the ecosystem. We’ve had a few conversations with Doug, as well as the rest of the Livepeer team, to see where we might fit into the ecosystem, and we feel like we have a few places where that could be interesting! We intend to develop these experiments in tandem with running our transcoder! Come along!
Immediate Efforts
- First, to show our support for the Livepeer ecosystem, we have open sourced our multi-merkle miner. It allows you a seamless and programmable way to fit as many merkle proofs as possible (we’ve successfully deployed 40 in a single transaction). We want to have a big stake in the ecosystem that we want to support. We’ve seen an existing implementation for this floating around, but the more the merrier. Feel free to use this and definitely stake towards us.
- We are going to build a Transcoding DAO, one that allows you, once you delegate your tokens to actually 1) choose where the funds are directed towards 2) and vote on the set parameters of the transcoder itself. Our thoughts, and initial code, are here. For the transcoder, we already have a T2 medium instance running on AWS.
Once we get the transcoding DAOs up and running, we would love to see other community members turn their transcoders into DAOs! If you’d like to delegate to our transcoder address, you can do so here.
Transcoding with Us
We are setting our initial parameters for reward cut at 30% and our fee split at 30% as well. We will be redirecting some portion of this to a decentralized “ecosystem” fund, detailed below.
For the record, our address is 0x346c7f442ab4941a97c8a63062bd40ef0f9dbd15. You can directly bond with us here. Please double check that the address that we have listed here and the address that is in the link match 
The first piece of common infrastructure we’re funding is the staking DAO itself, we will be posting development updates in this thread, so follow along here or on our Github!
Future Efforts
We have a number of other areas we’d like to build. We believe these may be useful DAOs that are 1) useful for the Livepeer ecosystem and 2) reusable across different protocols. These are:
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A DAO for a decentralized “ecosystem” fund. While Livepeer, Supermax, and other community members have done a great job of building infrastructure, we feel that the community should start directing some of it’s own funds! In general, the block-explorers, better node infrastructure, and documentation are sorts of “public goods” that are not supported at the level that is socially optimal for the protocol. These are the types of things that this DAO would fund. Additionally, this would go a long way towards decentralizing the ecosystem beyond the core Livepeer team.
- Additionally, we want to pledge a portion of our MerkleMine, as well as transcoding rewards towards a decentralized fund. Once this DAO is active, we will send 20% of our rewards and fees to this DAO. We’d love to have transcoders and community members directly send some of their fees and rewards towards this as well.
- Fee Setting DAO. The default transcoding parameters are great ways to onboard new transcoders as quickly as possible. We want to take this a step further and build default transcoding DAOs for the community to benefit. New and old transcoders should have the option to opt-in to a transcoder DAO(s) and have voting rights over changes in the reward and fee structure. This would allow rapid onboarding of transcoders to more finely tuned and potentially optimal earnings.
- Diversified Transcoding DAO for Delegators. Instead of directly staking with one transcoder, a delegator may choose to delegate to this DAO instead that has a target return rate. The holders of the token, or some designated set of voters will choose with which DAO to stake with. We see this as the complement to the transcoder DAOs but for delegators instead.
- Using Governance HQ Dashboard. In conjunction with the DAO, we are building out a dashboard to help manage votes and check along for progress with this DAO. You can follow along at our website.
- Registering an ERC725 identity. When you’re on the dashboard, you can go and register an ERC725 identity. As the number of protocols in the ecosystem grows, this will help bring a little clarity beyond the pseudo-anonymous addresses we love so much.
While we’re doing this because we want to support the Livepeer ecosystem, we want reuse what we build/use here across protocols. We’d love to have you all contribute towards those efforts as well. Many thanks and happy transcoding/delegating!