title: ‘Livepeer Glossary’
sidebarTitle: ‘Livepeer Glossary’
description: ‘A comprehensive glossary of terms used in the Livepeer Real-Time AI & Video Network’
Protocol Actors are the main participants in the protocol who make up the core functions of the network (wrong).
Protocol Actors include gateways, orchestrators, and delegators.
A Livepeer actor is a participant in the protocol or network-human or machine-that performs a defined role such as submitting jobs, providing compute, verifying work, or securing the system.
An abstraction layer on the livepeer protocol that provides tools and services for developers to use & build applications on top of Livepeer. Examples include Livepeer Studio, Daydream, and Streamplace.
A gateway is a Livepeer node operated by a user or organisation to interact directly with the Livepeer protocol.
Gateways submit jobs, route work to orchestrators, manage payment flows, and provide a direct interface to the network.
Not the same as hosted services like Studio or Daydream.
A supply-side operator that contributes GPU resources to the network.
Orchestrators receive jobs, perform transcoding or AI inference, and get paid via LPT rewards + ETH fees.
Anyone building applications using Livepeer, usually through hosted services (e.g., Studio, Daydream) or library SDKs.
Developers only run gateways if they want direct protocol access.
The Livepeer Foundation is a non-profit organisation that stewards the long-term vision, ecosystem growth, and core development of the Livepeer network. It is owned and governed by its members, who have the ability to vote on proposals and make decisions about the direction of the organisation.
The Livepeer on-chain treasury is a smart contract that holds and manages the Livepeer protocol’s funds. It is responsible for distributing rewards to orchestrators and delegators, as well as funding the Livepeer Foundation and Special Purpose Entities (SPEs). The treasury is governed by the Livepeer community through a decentralized autonomous organisation (DAO) and is designed to be transparent and accountable.
See WikipediaA decentralized autonomous organisation (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC),
is an organization managed in whole or in part by decentralized computer programs, with voting and finances handled
through a decentralized ledger technology like a blockchain.It is owned and governed by its members, who have the ability to vote on proposals and make decisions about the direction of the organization.
An Ethereum address on the blockchain is a 42-character hexadecimal string that starts with 0x.
It is derived from the last 20 bytes of the public key and is used to send and receive funds or
interact with smart contracts.
The Ethereum blockchain uses a block.timestamp field within each block, which is a 256-bit value
representing the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC (Unix time).
This timestamp is used by smart contracts for time-dependent functions but is a network mechanism,
not part of the address format.
“Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network.”
A network where physical or computational resources (GPUs, bandwidth, storage) are coordinated through crypto-economic incentives.
The governance and staking token used for orchestrator selection, delegation, reward distribution, and protocol security.
The Livepeer Token id deployed to the Ethereum Mainnet, however multiple
Main Definition: The study of designing economic systems for decentralized networks.
This term is often used when describing both the protocol functions and which token incentives serve to create the optimal codified environment for the efficient operation of the network.
Usage in Practice:
This term is often used in multiple senses in web3, being used in both a macro economics sense (to describe high level actors incentives and their impact on behavior) and in a micro sense to describe inflation curves, token allocations, the tokenomics of a specific actor (e.g., orchestrator, delegator, broadcaster, etc.), token release schedules, etc.
On-chain refers to the data and operations that are recorded on the blockchain.
In the context of Livepeer, it refers to the protocol layer that governs staking, delegation, rewards, and verification.
Off-chain refers to the data and operations that are not recorded on the blockchain.
In the context of Livepeer, it refers to the network layer that performs video transcoding,
AI inference, and job routing, including orchestrators and gateways.
The SFA model requires service providers to stake a protocol’s native token to perform work on the network, which converts network participation into token buying pressure.
The phenomenon where the value of a product or service increases as more people use it. Not specific to Livepeer, but relevant to the value proposition of the network.
