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Start here in 5 minutes
- Prereqs: Active orchestrator setup, bonded LPT, and round/earnings visibility in Explorer
- Time: 5 minutes
- Outcome: Clear understanding of ETH vs LPT revenue and commission settings to tune
- First action: Review Commission Parameters, then set target
rewardCut/feeShareand verify yourReward()automation cadence
The Two Revenue Streams
1. ETH Service Fees (Demand-Driven)
Every time a gateway routes a transcoding or AI inference job to your orchestrator, it pays you in ETH. Payments flow via Livepeer’s probabilistic micropayment system — payment tickets that represent ETH obligations, redeemed on-chain periodically.- Transcoding fees — Earned for encoding video segments for live streams
- AI inference fees — Earned for running AI pipeline jobs (text-to-image, LLM, image-to-video, etc.)
2. LPT Inflationary Rewards (Protocol-Level)
Each round, the Livepeer protocol mints new LPT and distributes it to active orchestrators proportional to their stake weight. To claim your round’s reward, you (or an automated bot) must call theReward() function on-chain.
- Inflation rate is dynamic — it increases when less than ~50% of LPT is bonded, decreases when more than ~50% is bonded
- You only earn inflation for rounds in which you call
Reward()— missing a round means missing that round’s issuance - As of 02-March-2026, 10% of each round’s issuance goes to the Livepeer Treasury
Currency Summary
| Currency | Source | How You Earn It |
|---|---|---|
| ETH | Gateways paying for jobs | Win transcoding + AI jobs; redeem winning payment tickets on-chain |
| LPT | Protocol inflation (minted each round) | Bond LPT, activate as orchestrator, call Reward() each round |
Commission Parameters
When you register as an orchestrator, you set two commission parameters:Reward Cut
The percentage of LPT inflationary rewards you keep as the operator. Your delegators receive the remainder, proportional to their stake.- You keep 20 LPT
- Delegators split 80 LPT proportionally to their stake
Fee Share
The percentage of ETH fees from jobs that is shared with delegators. The remainder you keep.Setting attractive commission rates helps attract more delegators, which increases your stake weight, which increases your inflation reward allocation and makes you more competitive for jobs. It’s a compounding competitive dynamic.
What Determines How Much Work You Win
Job routing in Livepeer is competitive. Gateways select orchestrators based on:- Stake weight — Higher total stake (your self-bond + delegators) means you’re higher in the active set
- Capability matching — Do you support the requested pipeline, model, or resolution?
- Performance history — Transcoding success rate, latency, uptime
- Pricing — Are your fees competitive vs. other capable orchestrators?
- Model warmth — For AI jobs, having models already loaded in GPU memory wins jobs over orchestrators with cold models
AI Inference vs. Transcoding Fees
As Livepeer expands into AI inference, the fee landscape is changing:| Video Transcoding | AI Inference | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | Per segment (few seconds of video) | Per inference job |
| Fee level | Low (competitive, commoditised) | Higher (GPU-intensive, model-dependent) |
| GPU requirement | GPU recommended, not required | GPU required |
| Job frequency | Continuous for active streams | Per-request |
| Model setup | N/A | Warm model = faster jobs = more wins |
Payment Mechanics
Livepeer uses probabilistic micropayments to pay orchestrators efficiently at high frequency without paying on-chain gas for every segment:- For each job, the gateway sends a payment ticket
- Each ticket has a probability of being a “winning ticket” worth a larger ETH amount
- When you receive a winning ticket, you submit it on-chain to redeem the ETH
- The expected value of tickets over many jobs equals the agreed service fee
Monitoring Your Earnings
The Livepeer Explorer shows:- Your current stake, delegators, and stake weight
- Round-by-round reward history
- Fee revenue over time
- Active set status
Prometheus Metrics Reference
Full list of metrics exposed by go-livepeer for monitoring.
Reward Calling Automation
Missing a round means missing that round’s inflation. Most production orchestrators automateReward() calls:
- go-livepeer flag:
-reward=trueenables automatic reward calling from your node - Ensure your node has sufficient ETH on Arbitrum to cover gas for the reward transaction
- Monitor for missed rounds — the Explorer shows your reward calling history