Livepeer, a decentralized video streaming platform based on the Ethereum blockchain, has announced that it has raised an additional $20 million in its latest round of funding. The money will, among other things, allow the protocol to deploy on Arbitrum.
A fundraising round to access Arbitrum
After its second round of funding in July 2021, Livepeer announced it had raised an additional $20 million. On this occasion, Alan Howard and Tiger Global (2 renowned investors of the decentralized web) join the ship. Players already present in the project have also contributed to this fundraising: the Digital Currency Group, Northzone and Warburg Serres. The total amount of investments is now about 51 million dollars.
This new round of funding will allow Livepeer to continue its conquest of the video transcoding market. Indeed, a major update of the protocol is planned for the beginning of the year. Called “Confluence”, it will allow the network, currently on Ethereum, to be deployed on the second layer solution Arbitrum. This will greatly reduce costs.
Decentralized streaming 50 times cheaper!
Created in 2017, Livepeer offers a decentralized video transcoding platform. For the uninitiated, transcoding is the process of transforming an initial video stream (source) into other formats (360p, 720p, etc.). This process ensures that the user gets the best possible experience depending on their bandwidth.
Currently, about 80% of bandwidth consumption on the Internet is for video viewing. With a transcoding cost of $3/hr of streaming, this represents an insurmountable barrier to entry for platforms that would like to compete with Twitch or YouTube. Livepeer announces a reduction of these costs up to 5,000%.
Since the platform is decentralized, LivePeer Tokens (LPT) owners can allocate their computing resources to the network to participate in the transcoding process. The other option is to delegate your tokens to the most efficient and honest nodes to secure the network.
Behind the scenes, decentralized digital service platforms continue to grow to compete with centralized web companies such as YouTube and Twitch. With ever more massive investments, will projects, such as LivePeer, be able to deliver on their promises of scalability, security and cost reduction? Whatever the case, the decentralized web is increasingly attracting video, social networking and gaming projects.
