What a delegator is

A delegator is an LPT holder who bonds their tokens to an orchestrator. This puts your capital to work securing the network and earning a share of that orchestrator’s rewards — without running any hardware yourself. The single most important idea: What changes when you bond is attribution: your balance now counts toward one specific orchestrator’s total stake, which is what determines its rank and reward share.

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Why “doing nothing” costs you

Livepeer mints new LPT every round and distributes it to bonded stake. If you hold LPT but leave it unbonded, you receive none of that issuance while bonded holders do. Your share of total supply shrinks over time. Staying unbonded is not a neutral position — it is a slow dilution.

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What you earn

A bonded delegator can earn two things, both filtered through the orchestrator you pick:

• LPT inflation rewards — a share of each round’s newly minted LPT, after the orchestrator keeps its rewardCut.
• ETH fees — a share of the ETH the orchestrator earns for compute work, according to its feeShare.

Neither is guaranteed by bonding alone. They depend on the orchestrator staying active and reliably calling reward() each round. See Economics for the formulas and a worked example.

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One wallet, one orchestrator

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Switching vs exiting

There are two different ways to change your position — pick by what your problem is:

• Redelegate — move your stake to a different orchestrator without the unbonding wait. Use this when the issue is the operator (missed rewards, worse terms, dropped out of the active set).
• Unbond and withdraw — stop participating and wait out the unbonding period before tokens return to your wallet. Use this when you want liquid tokens back.

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What you’re actually risking

Slashing is not currently active on Livepeer mainnet, and your tokens are in the protocol contract — not the operator’s wallet. So the real risks are operational, not custodial:

• choosing an orchestrator that misses reward calls (the pool simply forgoes that round’s inflation — there is no catch-up)
• an operator that later changes commission terms unfavorably
• needing liquidity before the unbonding period has passed
• contributing to stake concentration by always picking already-dominant operators

This is why reward-call reliability matters more than a slightly better headline commission.

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