Livepeer 🛠 Incentive Design for Web3 Streaming Apps - Eric Tang

[Applause] [Music] okay sweet all right uh we are ready to go so hi everyone um my name is cree i'm from the youth global team we have eric here from live pier um he's going to talk to us about incentive design for web3 streaming apps um huge fan of live pier they're what i built on on my first youth global hackathon um so yeah super excited and yeah just as we mentioned we'll leave about five-ish minutes towards the end for like a quick q a session but feel free to drop all your questions in the chat as we go along just so you don't forget them um and then if you're a little bit shy like me there's always the live peer discord channel for you to ask questions and as well so all right eric take it away thank you creep um yeah excited to be back at uh it's online uh and um you know today you know i usually talk about kind of building um application building um so today's converse uh topic is a little different it's about incentive design um and and the reason i i want to talk about incentive design is is because i think it's it's really an important cornerstone for building a the web 3's killer consumer application right so um so i think the combination of video streaming and incentive design can really bring us uh this this kind of watershed moment that brings lots of consumers into the web3 space and and the reason i i want to talk about it today is because i think now is the right moment to start thinking about it uh so so why why now uh well a couple of reasons one um we we continue to see the native demand to grow in weapon three and what i mean by that is the number of people who are um exposed to you know web 3 experiences continue to grow um despite the you know despite the the bear market right if you if we look at the number of wallet downloads if we look at the number of um the unique users for for some of the popular applications we see that you know the user account continues to grow right and what that means is now we have you know a few million downloads for some of the popular wallets and that's enough of an initial audience for a massively scaled streaming application like um you know like a um decentralized youtube something like that right um and and though so so the demand is kind of there uh however where this interesting time where it's still early that you know all the high quality web 3 content are all kind of living at different places right no one has really done the the work to put aggregate all of that content together to create a really great consumer and creator experience that um that allows us to have this aggregation point um and and so you know and that brings us to the third point where you know a lot of this you know really great web 3 content is actually hosted on web 2 platforms right so youtube is one of the most popular tools for for people to uh for web3 creators to put their video there however we continue to see these web 2 video platforms to um to censor uh web3 uh creator content right we see um you know podcasts like bank list where they uh their youtube channel gets suspended right and you know backflips was actually the lucky case where they they were able to reinstate their um their channel back after a couple of days for some of the web creators their um you know their content was you know just taken down and their channel suspended uh and and they weren't even they didn't have the opportunity to to you know back up and download their uh their videos right so so and it is quite a catastrophic event when when you know this happens to you as a creator um so so all of this culminate um at um at the same point um and and the the other thing i would mention is uh is that you know through years of iteration um today we finally have um a a ecosystem of web 3 infrastructure that's actually mature and performant for us to be able to build a a consumer application that that is actually competitive from a user experience perspective to you know a facebook or youtube right we have um decentralized storage solutions that are performing pretty well we have data indexing solutions like the graph that's that's that's working well with live peer you know life here is processing um you know five uh two and a half to three million minutes of video per week right so all of this all of these infrastructure are at scale now um so um so you know today's topic is about incentive design right and there are a couple of different ways to look at it uh the first um aspect that i want to start introducing is is this idea of creator-centric uh incentives right and that's really uh looking at incentive design uh as a um you know as a tool to grow this creator economy that that we're starting to see it's emerging to be a big trend on the internet right and especially in web three we're already seeing this narrative contin grow and it continues to grow things like tools like nfts uh tools like uh token gating right like all these uh all these things are um creating really interesting um incentive structures that allow the creator to um to migrate over to to website platforms so when we talk about um creator centric incentives uh i think of i think of three goals right one is um we can create we can create incentives that amplify the creator's success right the creator is putting something out there they're good at something so so that's the you know that's the seed of um of their success and creating incentives um help them to amplify their success to to scale up their success right but you know the incentive itself is not enough for um for the creator right because uh because there needs to be there needs to be this kernel of demand um that they're already creating um but the the really big uh differentiator in web 3 is the fact that um creators through web 3 are able to directly connect with their audience that they're able to own their own data right instead of um so instead of being on you know web 2 platforms where you're really building your audience on on a platform you're beholden to that platform you're getting paid from that platform right in in this in the web 3 paradigm you're directly connecting with your fans and if your fans are directly paying you through uh this new payment payment rails right so so oh and and we're removing that that middleman and that's a that's a really powerful shift in paradigm um and and so here in web 3 we're really thinking about creating new tools um for creators to create what they would uh to to do what they're good at which is creating uh and to to monetize what they're creating so um if we look at um these incentives there's already a number of really interesting examples right so i'm just going to point out a few of them um direct tipping slash nft mints is becoming pretty popular right and this is the idea of the creators putting a creation out there for example you record a video uh you put it onto um you know something like a lens tube uh you were able to allow your viewers to tip directly tip you um based on your your own crypto wallet address or you allow people to mint uh nft based on what you have created right so either you know they mint an ftp based on the video that you created or maybe they mint an nft that allows them to have a highlight of the video rio or something like that right um token gating for for video create content is emerging to become a really interesting tool here as well it's both for on-demand video which is you know uploaded video files and for live streams which is really you know kind of virtual events or performances that are happening in real time right so so you can use token gating to essentially um control access to who gets to um consume that content and and you know an interesting a popular mechanism is for creators to launch their own nfts and then create content only for the the fans who have purchased their nfts right and that's a really good way for the creator to um to kind of create exclusive content for their most loyal fans and to provide more values to them moving down the line there's one on one of one private video right so here we see examples like web3 centric or web3 based cameo only fans where your the creators are really creating a single video for a single person right and the opportunity here is to completely eliminate the middleman and and then have like a very low take rate or or zero take rate uh for that transaction uh fan rewards is something that uh that's a little newer but but i'm really excited about this about this concept um you know example here is a creator um offers a nft um to to their fans and the fans can stake their nft when they're consuming the creator's content and by doing that they get to earn tokens right so it's kind of consume to earn or watch to earn type model and these tokens are not necessarily you know monetary in some in any way but they can be really good mechanisms for things like redeeming merch or getting early access to new content or um you know getting access to special uh you know in real life experiences right so so this is a way for for the creators to uh to really reward people for uh engaging with their content and we already see some of this happening in in you know in real life or in the web 2 world for example if you watch uh twitch streams you you actually earn or twitch points right but you know the switch points only can be uh redeemed within the twitch universe uh versus for this fan rewards um we can start to design all kinds of new tools uh for creators to to engage with their fans um crowdfunding for for video production again another concept that i think is really powerful in in the web through world we see how quickly um someone um like an organization can do a crowdfunding campaign to create something right uh whether it's you know constitution dao or juice box or um uh or mirror and it's already a concept that's been proven that works well right so so i'm interested to see more hacks in in in this direction um and and finally the last thing i'll mention is is social goods um so an example here is doing good which is a nft platform uh that promises to um contribute um a certain percentage of the proceeds to a good cause right so you know it's similar to locum feels a little similar to like open c but the difference is that it's always um contributing to a common to a good cause and and this is a really interesting incentive to get a lot of the web 2 create uh existing creators in the web 2 space who are maybe a little are a little weary about um how how they might come across to their audience um if they just jump in and start creating nfts right um by having this social good alignment um it's oftentimes a good uh introduction to uh to a web 2 centric audience uh about the um you know about this like web 3 incentives right um you know so so these are some creator-centric uh incentives that i've seen that are that are interesting um another topic that i want to cover here is kind of community-centric incentives right so so this is distinct um in that here we're really trying to create a community uh and increase community member engagement by um by uh offering the community members an opportunity to have skin in the game uh another way to think about this where is that we're designing a micro economy for a community right um so so there are you know there are many different uh considerations uh when we talk about this right so so for example um when we uh when we do this we talk we think about having a resource pool at at launch right it can be a token pool uh where um you know you kind of create allocations between inflation which represents kind of community participation and the core team that's creating uh that's creating the project right you need to think about inflation schedule um you know whether it's a continuous model or or how governance um uh comes to play you need to think about the token distribution mechanism and especially how how to account for kind of productivity or um or or value creation right so for example um if you think about a contributing role for a community they're they're adding value and getting rewarded right so for example for a content creator um they're they're creating content by adding value and they're they're getting rewarded for creating content there's the opportunity to have a curator role which is really helping helping others to discover the the content that's been created there's the moderator and coordinator role to help organize and ensure high quality board for or kind of a good experience for florida community members that are participating um and and finally we're starting to see these concepts of drops right and you know at the very beginning it was mostly uh nft drops but we're starting to see uh there's you know merch drops there's now even content drops or events that are scheduling and these are all um tools that community organizers can use to create more value for the for the community members right so so this is a pretty hypothetical and conceptual description so let's use an example to really illustrate um what what this can be right so also here we're we're talk we're thinking about a um a theoretical uh community-owned video platform so i think think of this as a web 3 version of a youtube or a patreon or or a twitch right um we can think about uh the inflate token inflation and inflation schedule and and really early incentives for for participants right um and and here we can we can think about the different um the different people who are participating in contributing value we we should be putting aside value for uh people who are building an application or people who are actually creating the video content people who are doing the content moderation um the how this token can play into the governance of the community and how and how this token can be used to incentivize uh operators to come in and actually play the operations role um we um we also should think about the distribute uh um how did this how to actually distribute the ownership to these early participants and and how to make this long term sustainable right so a pretty traditional like token distribution model is is something like this right a core team comes together they decide you know we're gonna put put aside 20 of all the tokens for the core team and put aside 20 to the treasury 15 to investors if they're you know raising some money to get started and then you know the rest which is 45 uh can be uh can be for the community uh in kind of a participation based distribution or mining based distribution something like that um and so this is a um you know this is the mechanism that's been used for years um and it can be a good solution for uh for you if you're building especially like an infrastructure project that requires you know 12 18 months of building before you launch something and you need to you know essentially raise some money capital at the beginning to to fund to help fund to that milestone um and there's actually a really good article um here i i linked here and then you know i'll i'll share this um share this stack out in the um in the in the youtube link where we'll you know talk about the the the link talks about the different types of tokens um token distributions and then kind of the proper projects um and how they have done it over time um but a really interesting trend that we're starting to see recently is that um token distribution mechanisms are starting to become more community driven right versus you know the tradition model the traditional model was still like a little centralized right the the core team come together and makes all the decisions for everybody um and um and varian is a investor in the space they've done a really good job um kind of uh summarizing all of this all of these new trends right we're starting to see kind of bottoms up uh token design right where um incentives are really um kind of uh core contributors to to the long-term success of the protocol uh something that um you know a really interesting project that i want to highlight here is this project called non-style where you know every day there's a new um new nft that gets auctioned off uh and this option has been going on for about a year and um and and over this time um you know this this dow was able to build up a pretty significant treasury and and every nft holder that that gets the nft through this auction are able to vote on proposals for for the doubt in terms of how to spend that treasury right so and the whole um mission for for um for this dow is to kind of uh perpetuate the the success of uh of this nft project right and it's a really interesting um kind of a continuous auction model to see how this how to see how that ecosystem has evolved over time uh they've gotten um you know filmmakers to to make films for for this uh for this nft and they've gotten uh artists to create uh really interesting exhibits uh around this nft and living building uh building this franchise over time um let's um let's we can shift topic a little bit and talk about kind of creator token incentive right so so you know before here we talked about kind of the initial token distribution and inflation schedule and how that would look like um so we're gonna zoom in a little bit and think about how we can incentivize creators to actually come to this video platform and and and create content and put their content on this platform right um one way to think about it is you can offer creators tokens through um through video engagement metrics right so here what we're seeing is um the more the more engaging your video is the more you will get rewarded right so we can this is a very simple example we can say you know every day there's a certain amount of inflation uh inflationary token that gets uh that gets distributed to all the creators that that put video on this platform and the amount of token that each person get is based on the amount of engagement that they get in that day for all the videos that they have uploaded right so how do we calculate the engagement we can we can say you know the engagement is the total views of the video plus the number of comments on the video or you can um have some kind of multiple for the comments uh if you want to count the comments as as a more um active engagement versus the view as a more passive engagement right and the way we can do this uh to actually implement it is to for every day we uh we aggregate all this uh data together we calculate who um who gets how much token we put all of that information into a merkle into a merkle tree and write the merkle root on chain right and every day um uh these creators can come and claim their um their reward based on based on that merkel uh based on that merkle tree right so we do need to do some off-chain calculation of course we do need to have an oracle that writes this data on chain so we need to have a like a trusted source uh but i think that's a that's a an okay way to to get started on day one another important thing to point out here is to make this uh incentive fair for everyone it's important to have a governance mechanism that allows the community to come come together and decide that there is actually a more fair incentive incentive model in the future and and have a have a governance mechanism to upgrade to that new in to that new mechanism right uh and here we should also think about uh simple attack vectors so for example um we can we can say only the token holders can can create comments for for the videos right so so that prevents kind of spammers from just coming and creating a bunch of uh spammy content um next area we can talk about a participation token incentive right so here we talked about you know creators we're actually creating videos uh but you know there's more participants than just creators uh video creators in in this um like in this platform right so we can have curators we can have people who are remixing the content um we can think about access control like token gating and how that can play into the incentives model and finally we can think about builder incentives right so curator is an idea that um you know um these participants can can create their kind of taste makers right they can create lists of really interesting videos based on a certain theme and they can continue to add add new content to this list right you can um and consumers can decide to subscribe to um to these channels um and we already see that exists in today's web 2 applications uh so spotify it's pretty famous for like crea um like having curators create those playlists and you know today the majority of the traffic on on spotify is through these playlists right but spotify you know chooses to to pay these curators a certain amount and but they they keep the the the majority of all that app revenue um but for uh for a web 3 platform i think the incentive can be a lot more transparent here uh same as remixing right um and so to create if i'm a creator and i'm creating content i can you know potentially decide uh whether my content is allowed to be remixed and how i want to share um the incentives for me with the people who are remixing my content right with the idea of that remixing my content actually drives more traffic to um to my original content um another idea is here is access control token gating we talked about this a little bit uh a really interesting kind of waste uh thing to think about here is like what you are using to do to do the access control right so for example you can say um you can only um you know my channel is only viewable if you uh if you pay the subscription fee in um in the the platform token that the platform launches right or you can say i actually accept uh different types of other tokens for example if the blockchain native token is a is a good option so that what that just means you know if you're building on ethereum you would take if you're building um uh polygon you would take matic and things like that um or you can say you know i'm a creator that i've actually launched my own nfts in the past and i want to gate my content uh through my nft ownership right or you can even launch your nft through the platform and the platform could potentially take a percentage uh and to keep in its treasury to fund development of the platform itself let's i want to jump forward and talk about governance and operations so governance is an important aspect for for any of the any kind of token incentivized communities right because um um it is important for the community to be able to get to uh get together and make important decisions for the community and that's kind of the cornerstone of a community-owned platform right so some ideas around what the token can actually govern right things like the inflation schedule things like treasury management or resource allocation things like content policy all right what kind of content is allowed on this platform is oftentimes very very important for a content platform especially a user-generated content platform um and and and special programs things like marketing things like community building um you know incentives programs right um and uh and you know i want to specially call out content moderation especially for video streaming platforms uh because um it's oftentimes a really um a really tough problem to to address right and and i think here to start out um a a strong having a strong content policy and having a mechanism for token holders to be able to flag questionable content is a good way to get started um pre-scale right and once you get to get to scale once you become a bigger target i think um you can start to invest in automated flagging for for illegal content and there's there's a lot of good um kind of well-trodded grounds in terms of how health platforms have done that in the past finally i want to just point out some infrastructure considerations as as you're building these um um these like token incentivized streaming platforms um you can think about like the types of video services that are being offered right so whether it's video on demand or video live streaming or even video conferencing um and and as you're thinking about infrastructure it's important to consider that the videos that are being streamed are um are transcoded and delivered through different transformations and that's to ensure the scalability and the reliability of of the viewing experience so it's important to consider that it's not just somebody uploading an mp4 file and streaming the original mp4 file right there's there's multiple steps that uh that are in between to make sure the video streaming quality is high it's important to think about infrastructure portability when you're choosing a uh choosing an infrastructure provider right um for example vendor lock-in is a is a really big problem especially for the today for today's uh cloud providers right if you're using amazon for example it's really hard to move off of amazon right but if you're using a web 3 platform right if you're using ethereum for when you're using ethereum for as your blockchain service you can pick any of the providers right whether it's infuria or alchemy or or quick node or any of them and and there's no vendor locking whatsoever so so also important to consider that in the web3 context and data portability is another big one right on top of vendor portability they imported data portability is really about um verifiable ownership for the user about the data that they own right so in this case it's verifiable ownership of the video that someone has uploaded into your platform um they um you know in this web 3d paradigm right like the creator should be the owner of um of the video that they have uploaded and there should be verifiable proof that um that they own this video and they're simply using these these platforms as a tool to distribute that video to to the viewers right and you know life here has been working in many of these areas especially in the portability and infrastructure portability areas so if you're interested to uh dig in more there please reach out to us come to our discord and things like that um i am i'm not gonna spend too much time talking about this because i know we're a little bit over time um i just want to briefly mention uh there's lifeguard studio that kind of wraps all this up to you in a very easy to use api and hosted um hosted gateway to the lifeguard network it provides um you know video on-demand service um video on demand is actually a a pretty new um area that we we're we've been doing a big push on in the past few months uh we're uh we're putting something out there this week uh that includes uh kind of a video on demand api uh a easy to use sdk a video player that you can embed in your application um out-of-the-box video metrics and also um tools for minting video based nfts especially for long-form video um using lifeguard um is really uh beneficial the other thing that i will mention is is there is a live streaming api as well that allows you to do you know video ingest transcoding delivery 3d api um it has an sdk and video stream player component as well and it also allows you to broadcast video straight from the browser uh which um you know if you're familiar a lot of times uh broadcasters have used have to use a you know a like a separate application something like the obs to be able to broadcast um so yeah so um there's there's lots of hackathon developer um resources i i highly recommend uh signing up for the livecare developer program so go to lvpr.link devs and you can sign up to talk to one of our one of life here's team members and talk talk about your hack with us get product feedback and things like that we're we're here to to support you um we we love the youth global community and you know as well as you know there is a uh youth global life here channel that you know a lot of you have already know about uh there is a hacker quick start guide uh that's a notion page that gives you a lot of the the good resources you know example applications and things like that and of course there's the life care studios docs which is a pretty well maintained uh resource for anyone building application using lifesphere um there's overall a ten thousand dollar uh prices price pool right split between first second and third place uh so so yeah looking forward to uh to seeing all the interesting hacks that you guys built awesome yeah if you have any last-minute questions feel free to drop them in the chat um otherwise we have the discord channel um that the live peer team will be monitoring so you can always drop them there too since i know we're a little bit um past time um but yeah eric thanks so much for that workshop that was amazing always always super insightful um and educational and yeah thanks everyone for coming and thanks eric for hosting and we will see you at the next workshop yeah thanks for having me bye you