Decentralized Video Protocol Livepeer Raises $20M to Take On Streaming Giants

Livepeer, a decentralized video transcoding platform built on Ethereum, has raised $20 million in a funding round led by Digital Currency Group (DCG).

DCG was joined in the Series B funding round by several other noteworthy investors in the crypto space including Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund and Northzone. (CoinDesk is an independent subsidiary of DCG.)

As the Web 3 ecosystem continues to grow, dapp developers are working on decentralized alternatives to everything from financial products to entertainment, including gaming and music-streaming.

But many would-be decentralized streaming platforms and startups encounter trouble building with centralized infrastructure owned by tech giants like Amazon and Google, said Livepeer co-founder Doug Petkanics.

He said the marketplace allows for a symbiotic relationship between buyers and sellers that is incentivized by Livepeer’s native token, LPT, and is much cheaper than the services provided by mainstream alternatives.

Livepeer’s marketplace connects encoding providers – many of whom are crypto miners and data centers with otherwise unused capacity – to anyone who needs processing power for video services. Livepeer has an estimated 70,000 GPUs on its network.

“In creating an open market run by a decentralized network of active participants, Livepeer’s transcoding can be 10 times cheaper (or more) than centralized alternatives like Amazon Web Services,” CoinFund CEO Jake Brukhman said in a press statement.