Hey Everyone,
Hope you're all having a swimmin' 2020 so far. Fellow GPU miner here, and was hoping to gather the GPU miner community's support on a new initiative we're launching. If you're not a big fan of long posts, scroll straight down to the cliffnotes section below.
We just recently launched an Orchestrator on Livepeer. Here's our announcement link. For those unfamiliar with Livepeer, here is a quick primer.
The background
Essentially Livepeer is a decentralized blockchain-based video transcoding network. People that wish to have their Videos transcoded in exchange for a payment, submit them to the network, which then goes out to a set of Orchestrators who then hand off that work to Transcoders. The Orchestrators coordinate the work and the Transcoders do the heavy lifting (typically GPU intensive work).
Until the last release the Orchestrator and the Transcoder role was played by the same process. The recent streamflow release has now split the role of the Orchestrator and the Transcoder and also allowed upto 100 Orchestrators (up from 25) to be part of the active transcoding set. How are these Orchestrators chosen? Based on the amount of Livepeer token that has been staked to them (either self staked or from delegators).
What this means is that GPU miners can now earn an additional income stream by running orchestrators on the network, taking advantage of Dual Mining + Video transcoding (The chips in graphic cards that process video encoding are different from the chips used for mining, making this possible): More on this here.
While the strides made are quite fantastic (we are huge fans of the Livepeer team), there are logical next steps to continue to improve the system.
The problems
a. Not everyone can run an orchestrator. Although there are open slots right now for people to join the top 100 quite easily, there is an investment of time and DevOps effort to run an Orchestrator, understand how to operate it and keep uptime and SLAs
b. Assuming one can overcome the above easily, the next problem is financial. Right now the top 100 is open to join (only 30+ are really filled) but this will change as more transcoding work and thus ETH fees come onto the network. This will mean only the top 100 in terms of owned or staked LPT will be active.
To give you an idea of how the barriers to entry could get high, it used to be 80K LPT owned or delegated to you (About $120K in USD), to be #25 on the list. Although the barriers will not be quite high with 100 slots, it could get significantly difficult for smaller operators to participate.
c. An orchestrator can pair up with GPU miners, but the infrastructure is early stage with no automatic payouts, blacklisting for poor or malicious performance or weighting the work given to a GPU miner by the stake they have delegated. This is not ideal and begs for a solution similar to how Mining and Staking pools evolved, allowing many small miners / holders to collectively pool their resources towards a common goal.
The Solution: Enter the Transcoding pool
It's in answer to the last question, that we're kicking off a campaign to fund and build a Transcoding pool for Livepeer.
We're not raising funds either via the traditional methods or through the IEO/ICO/STO method for this project, but from you, the community, for offering a delegator service to you. More on that below.
Our ask of the community
Please delegate any Livepeer you own to our transcoder: 0xCdFC898128DBC380A60895c6E8C0975Dc07D07E0.
Our campaign page link.
How to buy LPT, How to delegate: https://www.yieldwallet.io/livepeer
We take a 25% cut of all inflationary rewards from newly minted LPT and a 50% cut of transcoding fees (Note that these fees are subject to change, up or down, as market prices become more apparent. We will definitely keep an open line of communication and explain every change we make). The 25% reward cut is on the higher side, but about half of what the Livepeer grants transcoder charges, given similar goals.
We will use the funds we receive to build a transcoding pool, which when completed, should be able to provide significant additional revenue for GPU miners who point to our transcoding pool to receive transcoding work. We anticipate our cut of the inflationary rewards and the transcoding fees dropping significantly once the project is live as we do not need the additional revenue for funding development anymore or if we manage to secure funding in the form of a Livepeer Grant. Here is the thread we're kicking off which we hope distills and formalizes into a grant request in the coming weeks.
If you're bullish about the whole space and Livepeer in general, do consider acquiring some LPT token (it's trading at about $1.50 now) and delegating to us, earning rewards (22% yield + a share in our transcoding revenues) and helping to fund a project that will benefit you down the line. Note: This is not investment advice. Your situation may vary. Please be careful and DYOR. The standard disclaimers.
More on our thoughts about this type of 'fund raising' here
What’s in it for you long term
In addition to being a part of the effort to help us build a transcoding pool that you get to participate in to earn Transcoder fees, miners that delegate to us will get preferential access to our transcoder pool for a few months as we open it up to the public in a phased manner.
The order in which Miners will be onboarded to our system will be determined by how early they delegate to us + the size of their stake.
What’s in it for you NOW
As supporters of our campaign, you do not need to wait until we’ve completed the Transcoding pool software and made it publicly available.
In the interim:
a. Earn 75% of the block rewards from LPT inflation, proportional to your stake.
b. Earn 50% of the rewards (proportional to your stake) from transcoding, paid out in ETH
c. We have the option of hooking our Orchestrator with transcoders. We will be rotating our transcoder connections with members that delegate to us. More details on this will be forthcoming.
Participation rules
In order to participate in this effort and avail of the benefits in the short and long term described above, please follow these simple steps.
a. Delegate to us (minimum delegation: 100 LPT)
b. Register yourself on yieldwallet.io
c. Send an email to [email protected] with subject line: LPT Delegation. Body of the email should contain: yieldwallet registered email, delegation amount, delegation date and ETH address from where the LPT was delegated.
Who are we?
We are a geographically distributed team of highly passionate and qualified Entrepreneurs, Product managers, Marketers, Engineers, DevOps and Customer support personnel headquartered in India.
Our founding team has decades of experience building and running highly scalable and available distributed systems in the Payments, Financial products and Networking space for companies like Cisco, Paypal and Bloomberg. The team is also experienced with running reliable nodes for coins such as Horizen and DASH as well as staking to currencies like Livepeer, Decred, Tezos and Cosmos.
We understand the Engineering. We get the DevOps. We love Blockchain technology and are staunch supporters of the philosophy and the economics behind Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies.
We’ve been through the ups and downs of the markets, but never lost our conviction on the space. Now, we’re here to BUIDL and enable the next bull market to begin by laying the foundation and the technology that will drive this revolution forward.
Cliff Notes
a. We are a Livepeer orchestrator.
b. We'd like to create an option for small GPU miners to participate in Video transcoding to earn revenue in addition to Mining.
c. We need to build a transcoding pool for that. We are a team of world-class engineers and definitely have the inhouse chops to build this.
d. We are raising money by asking that you just delegate your Livepeer token to us and enable us to earn rewards that we can use towards the development effort.
e. Please follow the participation rules described above to be eligible for all benefits.
f. Once completed you will have the option of running transcoders on our Transcoding pool and earning additional rewards.
g. We take care of all the logistics of running the Orchestrator as well as maintaining the investments needed to keep us in the active set.
h. All said, a much lesser ask we believe, than asking you to invest in us or raising funds through a token sale. We hope the community sees it that way.