Livepeer (LPT) is the native token of Livepeer, a decentralized network for video transcoding built on Ethereum as a mainnet ERC-20 token.
The token contract was deployed on 2018-04-30, and Livepeer's protocol logic for staking, rounds, and treasury migrated to Arbitrum One in 2022 for lower transaction costs. The network lets participants called Orchestrators supply computing power to transcode and process video streams for applications, coordinated and paid for using LPT. Livepeer has since expanded into decentralized AI inference workloads such as image and video generation.
Livepeer differentiates itself by turning spare and dedicated compute capacity into an open marketplace for video transcoding, and increasingly AI inference, rather than relying on centralized cloud transcoding providers.
LPT captures this activity directly: Orchestrators must have LPT bonded to them by Delegators to become eligible for paid work and earn a share of protocol fees, tying token demand to actual network usage rather than speculation alone. A dedicated Livepeer AI subnet, launched in Q3 2024, extended this model from video processing into decentralized AI compute.
LPT functions as both a work/utility token and a governance token within the Livepeer protocol.
Orchestrators bond LPT (directly, or via Delegators who stake to them) to become eligible to perform paid transcoding or AI-inference work and earn a share of protocol fees and rewards. Bonded LPT also determines voting power in Livepeer's on-chain governance system.
Circulating supply is approximately 49,688,954.55 LPT as of 2026-09-02, with a market capitalization near $65.1 million.
LPT's token generation event occurred on 2018-12-19, following Livepeer's founding in 2017.
The token's Ethereum contract was deployed earlier, on 2018-04-30 - a separate, distinct milestone from the token generation event. At the TGE, founders/team retained 1,235,000 LPT (36-month vesting) and 1,900,000 LPT were sold in a pre-sale (18-month vesting). Livepeer, Inc. later raised $20 million in a Series B round in July 2021 led by Digital Currency Group, and a further $20 million Series B-1 in January 2022 with Alan Howard and Tiger Global Management joining.
LPT is issued as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum mainnet, which secures the canonical contract via Ethereum's proof-of-stake consensus.
Livepeer's on-chain protocol logic - staking/bonding, rounds, the treasury, and the LivepeerGovernor contract - was migrated to Arbitrum One in 2022 to reduce transaction costs; Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup that settles to and inherits security from Ethereum. An Arbitrum-bridged representation of LPT is actively used for these protocol operations, while the original token contract remains on Ethereum layer 1.
Livepeer was founded in 2017 by Doug Petkanics (CEO) and Eric Tang, who previously co-founded the mobile browser startup Wildcard together and had earlier worked together at Hyperpublic.
Petkanics holds a computer science degree from the University of Pennsylvania (2006) and worked at Groupon following its acquisition of Hyperpublic.
Livepeer is developed by Livepeer, Inc., a US-incorporated company associated with an address in Brooklyn, New York, alongside an open-source community of protocol contributors.
Day-to-day protocol operation, however, is decentralized: Orchestrators and Delegators run and secure the network, and changes to protocol parameters and treasury spending require passage through on-chain governance rather than unilateral decisions by Livepeer, Inc.
Livepeer is governed on-chain through the LivepeerGovernor smart contract, introduced by the "Delta" upgrade (LIP-89 and LIP-91) in October 2023, which also created the Livepeer Treasury.
Voting power is proportional to bonded (staked) LPT; Delegators who bond LPT to an Orchestrator can override that Orchestrator's vote on individual proposals. The Treasury receives a configurable share of each round's LPT issuance, set by a treasuryRewardCutRate parameter, and every Treasury disbursement requires a passed on-chain governance proposal.
Livepeer announced the "Livepeer 2.0" upgrade on 2026-08-07, shifting the network's core supply unit from GPU hardware to a more abstract compute unit.
This change lets CPU-only nodes and API-based specialists also participate as Orchestrators. It follows the Livepeer AI subnet, a dedicated track for decentralized AI inference such as image and video generation, which launched in Q3 2024 and continued expanding through Q4 2025.
Trail of Bits conducted a security assessment of Livepeer's smart contracts and token protocol, published in March 2018.
Livepeer has not been audited by CertiK. The project runs an active bug bounty program on Immunefi; in August 2025, a protocol bug that could have allowed a malicious actor to claim more ETH fees than intended was identified and patched through this program, with no user funds lost. Structural risks include thin on-chain DEX liquidity relative to market capitalization and holder concentration, with the top 10 addresses controlling about 52% of circulating supply.
