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Livepeer’s original whitepaper (published 2017) outlined an ambitious design for a fully decentralized live video streaming network. The goal was to build “the world’s open video infrastructure”, where anyone could contribute or access video encoding and delivery on-demand.

View Livepeer Whitepaper

View the Livepeer Whitepaper on Github
 Livepeer was one of the earliest DePIN (Decentralized Public Infrastructure Network) projects in the blockchain space, a blockchain use case that is only more relevant today as AI reshapes industries and the way we work, collaborate and communicate. Key ideas outlined in the whitepaper included:
  • Incentivized Participation with a native token (Livepeer Token, LPT) and a trustless verification mechanism for video transcoding work. In the whitepaper’s design, anyone running a node could perform video transcoding (reformatting videos for efficient streaming) and be rewarded in LPT, while verifiers and game-theoretic protocols would ensure outputs were correct without a central authority.
  • Trustless Verification: A standout proposal was to use Truebit (a decentralized computation oracle) as a “black box” to verify transcoded video segments. Transcoding nodes would commit results on-chain, and a Truebit-based challenge could detect incorrect outputs, ensuring correctness without manual oversight.
  • Open Participation: The whitepaper envisioned a fully open market of transcoders (nodes providing compute) and broadcasters (users submitting video) interacting via smart contracts. There would be no built-in central server – “no central party or company needs to be relied upon for the continued operation of the network”.
  • Economic Security via Token: LPT was introduced as a coordination mechanism – nodes would stake LPT as a performance bond to earn the right to transcode video, aligning their incentives with honest work. This concept survives today: staked tokens act as collateral against malicious behavior, similar to a security deposit.
Did you know? Livepeer’s token distribution had no ICO LPT was distributed in a novel way called a Merkle Mine, allowing a wide set of participants to claim tokens at network launch.
You can view the github code here.

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Livepeer Now

Livepeer today both honors and extends the original whitepaper’s vision. The core idea of a decentralized video network powered by a crypto token has been proven in production – Livepeer handles millions of video minutes and has hundreds of node operators on five continents. Key technical shifts like off-chain scaling (Streamflow, Arbitrum) and the expansion into GPU-based AI workloads have kept the project on the cutting edge of what “open video infrastructure” means. What began as a decentralized live streaming protocol has grown into a general platform for real-time media computing.
The embedded whitepaper transcript is unavailable in this docs branch. Use the GitHub link above to read the full source document.
Last modified on March 8, 2026