Reviewing the Transformation SPE and Learnings for the Ecosystem
The Transformation SPE was established to accelerate delivery of key workstreams, distribute work and funding to end users, and demonstrate a healthy SPE model. Over the course of the SPE we made meaningful progress on each of these, while falling short in other areas where we’d probably not done the necessary groundwork to understand our overall readiness. The SPE closes having delivered value within budget and with learnings that can further shape how SPEs and the Foundation can maximise their impact in future.
Key Learnings
Scope discipline is critical.
Splitting one SPE across Capital, Builders, and Development was too ambitious and brought challenges around attention and context-switching which have real costs that make life harder.
The real benefit of an SPE is it becoming a focal point for many aligned contributors to coordinate closely and deliver core functional impact in one specific area. The Protocol SPE is a great example of this tight scope and clear focus, as would be a future Network-as-a-Product Development SPE that can own that product achitecture and development end-to-end.
Focused effort compounds.
Building on the above, concentrated effort on a well-defined agenda produces real network-level change. Tangible outcomes came from the capital workstream, if still a bit slower and less comprehensive than we would have liked. This agenda was well known as needing support, but until the Transformation SPE it had no “owner”. By acting as a steward for this and engaging the right talent on different steps, we were able to move forward proposals that had sat somewhat idle in the previous period. By bringing focus to what matters SPEs can make solid progress.
RFPs are a great mechanism.
The RFP process proved itself — Explorer, Devconnect, Docs and to a lesser extent the Protocol SPE all moved through it effectively. It created a direct link between deliverables and milestone based payouts that could be effectively enforced to ensure accountability for outputs and results.
This is the right model for attracting new talent and allocating work across the ecosystem going forward, and should be a part of the process and systems of all SPEs where allocating work to new parties is critical.
The Foundation’s identity is clearer.
This SPE surfaced what the Foundation does best: attracting talent, running credibly neutral processes, providing shared infrastructure, and maintaining transparency and coordination across different participants. The Foundation should not be such a deep executor, and not spread its direct focus across such a breadth of domains. We will aim to catalyse new efforts where they are needed, support teams to onboard and coordinate with others, and then find the right balance between keeping them accountable and giving teams space to ship.
Product clarity and readiness must precede builder programs.
We put builder infrastructure and GTM effort in place before the network product was defined and the intended audiences were clear. That sequencing error made it difficult for much of the Builders work to land.
We need to invest in and define the way we complete Product discovery first, and then focus on how we learn with (and onboard) those key customers. Running things in parallel sounds attractive, but often led to stop-start cycles as one part tried to catch up with the other. The new Network as a Product working group is a move in the right direction and allows for increased parallel processing and a focal point for discovery and builder acquisition to help us test and become a learning engine that drive increased pace.
Coordinaton is key to reduce silos and harness the power of the collective
Coordination and transparency improved as a direct result of this SPE. Publishing release notes, having the Technical PM work with project teams and help make new connections, and delivering the MVP of the public Roadmap are all a pre-cursor to more contributions to the ecosystem in a scalable way. Coordination must come from somewhere, and the Foundation is a credible and neutral entity to help the community on this path. This will remain a key focus for us moving foward.
So what’s Next
The idea of the Transformation SPE was to make rapid progress on key items. While we were able to do that, it highlighted important improvements still to go as we continue on the journey. With the Transformation SPE now closed, we’ll spend more time on trying to bring improvements to the operating system that supports governance and allocation of items against the the Livepeer Roadmap so more teams can be contributing directly. We’ll use these learnings from our own experiences with the SPE model, and the governance processes, to discuss broader “soft governance” enhancements that we think can make things clearer for voters, keep teams accountable, and allow people to focus on executing great work through a set of shared norms that keep us aligned.
There’s so many ways to invest in and improve the SPE model, the role of RFPs, the Roadmap, community proposed features and enhancements, the Foundation’s role as a coordinator and facilitator, and implementing high performance standards for teams that get us where we want to be as fast as possible. Focus, Speed and Coordination are as important as they were 4 months ago, and we have even more learnings to help Livepeer transform for the exciting future of realtime AI and video.
Transformation SPE Retro and Final Report
Commitments Scorecard
| Deliverable | Status |
|---|---|
| CAPITAL | |
| Create a Capital Management working group |  We engaged a number of different small groups to work on various workstreams for proposals below |
| Make a proposal to increase DEX liquidity for LPT pairs on Arbitrum. | Proposal made but paused due to funding constraints (for now!) |
| Make a proposal to adjust inflation for long term health. | Proposal made |
| Make a proposal to keep/adjust the treasury cap and start accumulating LPT back into the treasury. | Proposal passed |
| Actively manage capital to fund ecosystem operations and reduce risk | Partnership to supporting project funding began |
| BUILDERS | |
| Creating a new ecosystem development team focused on onboarding & supporting new builders |  Partial - Nick’s joined as builder lead to work on partnerships, and Ally won the RFP for the documentation updates. |
| However, we learned from core partnerships that onboarding to gateways needs further work and we need to do this . before further buildout of any team | |
| Launch a new knowledge hub on the website to easy onboarding and technical support | Partial — The Docs RFP was run and updates are provided within the V2 section of the docs portal. The Website needs more clarity on the ecosystem narrative and we have funded some work around this within the Foundation to help move foward. |
| Launch several key integrations with leading adjacent projects (e.g. Base, Zora, Eliza) within the GTM bets (e.g. open social or agent frameworks) | Partial — We started co-development with XMTP on chat & streaming, AR.IO (Arweave) with provenance and also with Zora, but have not moved as fast as we would have liked. |
| Seed the ecosystem with pre-packaged grant ideas and potential startups in video & real-time AI. | Partial — We have mapped out 10 buildable grant ideas but want to do more “readiness” work before moving these forward and spending funds on it |
| Microgrants Program + Buildable Ideas | |
| Activate and connect with an IRL builder community during a major activation at ETH Devconnect | We allocated the RFP for an IRL activation at Devconnect. The event was completed and brought good learnings for future. We’d like to improve attendance in future but this did create high visibility around the evening event. |
https://blog.livepeer.org/ai-x-open-media-forum-building-new-wave-creativity/
https://forum.livepeer.org/t/rfp-devconnect-assembly/3101/6?u=nickhollins | | Scope a funding mechanism to scale and accelerate promising projects with large ambitions. | 
Not started. We need more clarity on the network product and possible roadmap items around this | | DEVELOPMENT | | | Create a new core contributor coordination function & hub. | We established the Ecosystem PM role and launched the ecosystem roadmap to help create focus on contributions and support coordination | | Make a proposal to seed and structure a Protocol Development SPE. | Proposal passed and the Protocol SPE team are already shipping protocol upgrades | | Make critical explorer improvements (via RFP). | Explorer RFP allocated work and milestones completed. Huge thanks to this team being so responsive and visible at Watercoolers | | Publish initial core video primitives alignment spec | This did not move forward | | Steward payments clearinghouse roadmap & prototype with local SDK | Local SDK is done and payment clearinghouse MVP launched. Key building blocks for the NaaP |
What We Delivered
Meaningful progress on the capital agenda. The Treasury is back on, Inflation discussions are ongoing and have highlighted other improvements around “emissions”. Outside factors continue to drive discussions around network health but internally we are better structured coming out of this SPE as it relates to the Capital agenda than going in
A working RFP model. An established as a credible, community-facing process for allocating work. Time to align it with the Roadmap priorities and ramp it up
More decentralised core development. The Explorer team and Protocol SPE (along with Cloud separately) all now support core development of the network increasing our decentralisation and resilience. The Protocol Development SPE is now seeded and running independently. The Explorer RFP delivered its milestones and the team ingrained themselves in the community through regular attendance at watercoolers, being responsive, and whacking bugs as fast as they could. The Local SDK and the remote signer (payment clearinghouse) will be key elements of the network as a product work in future phases.
Improved Transparency and Coordination infrastructure. Retros and release notes, a public Roadmap, and a Foundation that is trying to support and coordinate alignment rather than exert control
Devconnect activation was completed — the builder day attendance was ok but we found high visibility through aligning with “creators” for an evening in our event space. Lot’s of good learnings for future IRL activations.
Where we fell short
Builders was an area where things didn’t go to plan as much. The core reason being that the network product and our coordination and alignment between different teams, products and gateways wasn’t defined enough to support a real builder program. Onboarding teams to gateways required foundational work that wasn’t yet done. The integrations with XMTP, Arweave, and Zora have only just started, and there are still many questions about where and how we can further support scaling of projects.
Video primitives spec Not started and value to be reassessed
Payment clearinghouse delivered the Local SDK but didn’t produce the end-to-end state change originally intended. This is now in iteration by the NAAP teams.
Budget
We delivered the Transformation SPE under budget. Below is a full reconciliation against the approved budget items.
The Foundation managed program costs against its own balance sheet throughout, ensuring the SPE could meet obligations quickly across both crypto and fiat which was critical for a program of this nature. We ultimately made the decision to absorb Marketing and activation costs as that function transitioned to the Foundation during the project.
One important note is that we chose not to convert the SPE’s token grant to stablecoins at program outset, choosing instead to only draw down our tokens to stables when we knew what was needed. Selling at the beginning would have created unnecessary selling pressure on LPT for tokens we never intended to spend — running counter to our role as ecosystem stewards. We believe that was the right call. The tradeoff is that the surplus LPT we are returning to the treasury now is less in dollar terms today than when secured, but on a token relative basis we have come in approximately 19% under budget based on LPT returning to the Treasury.
The net result: 8334 LPT is being returned to treasury, with no selling pressure having come from the SPE during the program. The roles funded through the SPE — Mehrdad and Nick — will continue under the Foundation’s own budget going forward.
| Line items | Budget | Description | Expenses accrued | Actual | Still Due | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capital | Working Group team members - 6 months | $ 36,000 | To pay for contributors | Capital Proposal teams | Absorbed by Livepeer Foundation | ||
| Builders | Developer Relations | $ 30,000 | RFP Docs: Ally | $18,500 | $6,250 | ||
| Builders | Builders Lead | $ 40,000 | 4-month contract (Sep → Jan) | FTE: BD & Partnerships | $40,000 | ||
| Builders | Event Agency + Activation | $ 40,000 | Based in Argentina for Devconnect | RFP Activation: Refraction | Absorbed by Livepeer Foundation | ||
| Builders | Builder Grants Q4 | $ 30,000 | Separate grants for builder activations | Encode Hackathon | Absorbed by Livepeer Foundation | ||
| Development | Protocol Development SPE | $ - | To be scoped and funded via separate proposal | ||||
| Development | Contributor Function Lead | $ 25,000 | 3-month contract | FTE: Ecosystem PM | $28,000 | ||
| Development | Explorer Maintainance & Improvements (RFP) | $ 40,000 | 4-month contract for stabilization & modernization | RFP Milestones: Raidguild | $38,000 | ||
| Development | Payments Clearinghouse Lead | $ - | Itnernal FTE’s for design roadmap and execution | ||||
| Development | Software Engineers | $ 60,000 | 2-month x 2FTE - build payments prototype + Local SDK | Dev FTE - 1 month | $9,100 | ||
| Budget Stables | $ 301,000 | $ 133,600 | $ 6,250 | ||||
| Budget LPT (Proposal) | 44,500 | 36165 | |||||
| LPT to return to Treasury | 8334 | ||||||
| (19% under budget) |
Acknowledgements
As it is with the SPE design, the SPE is not the end recipient of the funding because it is simply coordinating the contributions of many different people. All of the impact here was made by contributions from across the ecosystem including the Foundation and Livepeer Inc. A special thanks to everyone who contributed directly to the Transformation SPE — including Raidguild (especially EC Wireless), Ally, Andrew, Refraction, Nick, Mehrdad, Josh and John. Thanks for all the hard work and the learnings that will help us all as we move onto future phases of the SPE model.