EthCC 2: Raffi Sapire

all right hi everyone or at the final stretch here who here believes that blockchain can shift the paradigm of video technology how many people have heard of live peer awesome my name is Ravi I'm the head of operations and business development and live peer and what we're going to talk about today is how live peer is shifting the paradigm of video infrastructure by reducing the cost of transcoding by 50x I know you spent a lot of your day talking about technical implementations we're going to shift gears a little bit we're going to talk about why we believe that live streaming is going to be the first real-world use case for aetherium to disrupt an existing industry all right so video today the way it works is first of all it's insanely expensive today a broadcaster and this could I say broadcaster and it could it be a fitness streaming app like peloton it could be a telehealth company it could be a video gaming company like twitch no matter who it is any broadcaster who wants to distribute video to their users in a high quality way needs to transcode it and what transcoding is is it's taking a raw video file and it's reformatting it so that no matter what bandwidth you have to G or 5g and no matter what device you can have the best optimal viewing experience and this is extremely expensive it costs $3 per stream per hour just for the transcoding so if you're a company like twitch you're paying millions of dollars is an operating expense line just for the transcoding and then from there what you do is you send the video to a content delivery network which are also controlled by closed proprietary software providers now this problem is only growing today video is 80% of all Internet bandwidth use broadband usage and this is expected to grow why number one there's an explosion of content online every single brand is connecting with their audience through video because it's the most engaging the percent of population who has access to Internet is growing by 7% year-over-year the the quality of broadband is about to increase exponentially with the advent of 5g and there's more and more devices so as consumers we're expecting to be able to watch video on our way to work on our iPhone on our watch no matter what and so this is putting a huge demand on video infrastructure and we believe that peer-to-peer and cryptocurrency is the path forward so what we're doing is we're dramatically reducing the cost of video infrastructure so that no matter if you are a small company or a large company you can access this and be able to optimize the experience for your viewers so let's use an example strive is a startup they are helping high schools stream video of their sports games so that your granny or your uncle who's in Idaho can watch your daughter play sports in real time now today they've got about a hundred games that they're streaming to about a hundred viewers every week this costs them nearly forty two thousand dollars a year and they're gaining traction and the more viewers that they have and the more streams that they have the more the more they have to pay as an operating expense to be able to grow so they cannot today afford this level of scale given the cost structure now today all these transcoding software providers are ultimately run by under the underlying infrastructure is controlled by a few large providers like Amazon imagine a world where this infrastructure could be globally distributed and decentralized well that is what we are doing the live peer protocol coordinates computation resources around the world to transcode video we're harnessing cheap idle GPU capacity provided by the greatest supercomputer in the world which is cryptocurrency mining networks we have an API that provides broadcasters with access to this cheap affordable highly scalable computation resource and what's especially interesting is that over time the protocol can be used beyond video computation so this is what live pier enables you it enables a 98% cost reduction of transcoding so while it cost six hundred dollars a week for strive with existing players it costs 8 bucks with live pier it's low latency its high reliability and most importantly it's democratized value so how does this actually work so the broadcaster sends the video to the live peer network and nodes on the night on the live peer network which we call transcoders are competing based on price and capabilities to be able to do the work now once the job is complete they send the and it's verified they send the video to whatever the today to whatever the broadcaster is CDN is today or directly to storage if it's not live streamed and this could be a decentralized storage solution or it could be centralized now what role does etherium and live peer token play in this so when the broadcaster sends the job to the live peer network they're paying the transcoder with ether and the transcoders in the network have the privilege of doing the work because they have some minimum amount of live peer token staked in the network and this gives the broadcaster confidence that the transcoder has something to lose right that they are incentivized to do the work well otherwise they'll get slashed the transcoder earns ether for the jobs that they perform and they earn inflationary live peer token as a reward for staking their token token holders can also participate because it's a delegated proof of state network instead of running the transcoder nodes themselves a token holder can stake a transcoder to do the work on their behalf and they earn a portion of the ether and they earn a portion of the live peer token as inflation as well so here is what there's many reasons why we like being part of the etherium eco system but here are a few so life here has its own protocol and it's also built on top of the etherium protocol number one fast experimentation it's a great way for us to experiment quickly at a protocol level number two security because of the sheer market size of a theorem it makes it a powerful tool for security number three consensus so if there improvised consensus consensus on the same state so life here doesn't have to worry about nodes coming to consensus we have a consensus using aetherium and lastly the settlement layer we've seen a lot of tools like stable coins and lending coming or out on the etherium network and this helps live peer achieve its greater vision over time so what is what is the vision of live peer in the future so we I've just kind of laid out we started with transcoding as a feature right but over time many different services can be built in this decentralized way and this could be anything from encryption to a decentralized video player to decentralized storage all using the same underlying architecture and in in essence live pair becomes WordPress for video so one of the questions we think a lot about because this is a 10-year vision of a fully decentralized video stack right how do we sustain development beyond early launch now decentralize technologies fundamentally the model allows us to disrupt the innovation model now before we had a choice money or glory you had to choose whether you wanted to optimize for investors and their value or for users in open source but with blockchain often open source is a fundamental building block so now we have another choice are we building protocols or adapts the fad protocol thesis hypothesize that all the value would be accrued at the fundamental infrastructure layer and what happened as a result of that you saw a lot of smart people coming in and building their own protocol building their own app with their own token but we need more applications like meta masks like ether scan but these were funded by individuals and that's not necessarily a sustainable way to fund development long term so in a world where early entrants are out sizably rewarded for their contributions how do we as an ecosystem continue to fund development over the long term how do new contributors build a stake that makes them a meaningful incentivize participant over time we need to anticipate and provide a path for new contributors so that they can build tools and applications without directly having to purchase the token and what this does is it results in a healthy governance features and essentially what you're able to do is reach continuously reshuffle ownership towards those who are making contributions at the time so inflation funding is an interesting solution to this problem because the whole economy emerges with many different roles who are allowed to who were able to capture value so on the protocol developer layer they're the ones who are maintaining the protocol and you can have a percent of Genesis token in life peers case we kept 5% of the token as an endowment to fund development transcoders in our case but any sort of validator our keeper is securing the network and they earn in token inflation protocol application developers create user interfaces that make it easier to use and interact with the protocol and they can filled some sort of in-app like percentage fee that they take they can campaign as a keeper token holders curate they do the work of curating the keepers and holding them a cow and they are able to keep a reward cut of inflation and then lastly businesses they can create applications on top and identify arbitrage opportunities so I already kind of laid out that the ecosystem and how the broadcaster submits the job along with ether and the transcoders earned both that and live peer token and token holders over here on the right are staking their token towards a transcoder and earning live peer token as as a as a reward now application developers have an interesting scalable way to capture value here because they are able to build applications for token holders for transcoders for investors like dashboards that make it easier to use and secure the protocol and and so what they're able to do is they're able to campaign as keepers and get token holders to stick towards them because what they eat what what you're able to do in this ecosystem is that the token holders are basically voting on who gets to be a transcoder with their token right and in doing so what they're doing is they are also agreeing to an amount of their inflation that they're willing to give to the transcoder maybe if the infrastructure provider running the transcoder was also building an application like a staking application or an alert notification I might be willing as a token holder to give more of my inflation reward back to the transcoder for example I run a community node transcoder node and my and our inflation reward cut is 50% and it's used to fund future development and people are willing to do that because they know that it's going to overall appreciate the value of the network and so in so what you're able to do is application developers are able to go beyond just depending on one individual to agree to pay them to build a tool and they're able to campaign to the ecosystem and say hey this is one of what I want to build and people essentially vote with the way that they stake their token and businesses also can build businesses on top of life peer to make it more usable for broadcasters and so what you essentially have here is you've got these business services built on open source software with a shared infrastructure and transparent pricing now let's talk about a few examples of some of the tools that have been built in the live peer network because of this sort of model there's a project a company called Super Max that builds dashboards for protocol ecosystems they help our token holders understand the economics of what's going on in the ecosystem to make better decisions about how they stick their token another one that we that has come out of our ecosystem is called bison trails bison trails both created a they open sourced a script I don't know how many people here participated in the Merkel mine anyone okay well sorry the the Merkel mine basically allowed you to mine community allocated tokens upon network launched to main that and bison trails open source or Merkel might script for anyone to be able to use they also open sourced a alert notification that transcoders could get alerted if their node went down so they could go quickly fix it another one that just happened is the live peer subgraph and so this is a tool that allows us to index and query the blockchain and get pulled data in a very quick way and I think this is a really good example because what it did for the the community of life here is that it made the experience of staking a lot faster than it was before and this is important because it's an example of how you know maybe in web 3.0 speed and user experience isn't today prioritize but it does need to compete and this is an example of how you don't have to compromise decentralization for user experience so this is a little bit about number one why we think that live pier is going to be the first use case for aetherium disrupting an existing market and we talked a little bit about what it will take for the ecosystem to be able to realize this long-term 10-year vision if you're interested in getting involved a few things one we're hiring a protocol engineer we just publish the job post yesterday - if you're interested in hacking on something you can check out the community life peer community node github or there's a ton of different research opportunities and lastly if you want to play around with staking if you email me in the next 10 minutes if you email me in the next 10 minutes I'm happy to send you a couple lifehere token to play around with the Explorer and participate in the network so thanks any questions yeah hi thanks so there is this other project open-source project that's not a total blockchains based called pure tube that is essentially trying to do the other side of video distribution which is replace you tube with a network of federated network of federated instances that run peer tube that can share each other's catalog of videos and one a video gets popular it can be streamed over BitTorrent with using basically this thing called think web torrent there might be ways for the two projects to work together because one side can do the Carolee is my understanding is that on pure tube currently if you want to transcode you basically have to run that transcoding on the local machine that is hosting the instance so there might be something to do there hi how are you trying to to prove that the transcoding is is verified and is correct so um there's a few different options that broadcasters have they can verify it themselves we've been doing ongoing research with true--but where once the transcoder signals that they've completed the job that they they submit a hash with kind of the compilation of all of the different segments that they've done and that invokes a verification process with true--but we're also doing additional research that we just kicked off with a company called epic labs to look into other ways of doing verification beyond true bet as well hey do you have any thoughts on why the costs of transcoding are so high in conventional offers if they're if you're able to provide them for so much less yeah so so there's the software layer that a transcoder service provider charges and they're taking some under the hood there's the operating expense of building the software but you all they also ultimately have to run the software to transcode the video on servers and because of the like the sheer amount of scale that you need they're ultimately using AWS for theirs to run the transcoder nodes because each AWS server can only transcode for live streams at a time and it costs $700 a month to rent an AWS server so the more servers the more streams that your customer has the more you have to scale out your infrastructure and it's to cost intensives for them to invest in it themselves especially at the rate the video is growing and so this is essentially like the beauty of what we're doing is that we are harnessing idle GPU power to do the computation around the world because it's alright so each GPU chip in a crypto mining rig has an unusual eyes graphic card each graphic card can transcode for streams at the same time of mining whatever other currency they're doing so this is just additional income for them with a very little additional effects so they're willing to do the price way lower well thanks [Applause]