Roles & network
Orchestrator — A GPU operator that runsgo-livepeer, executes video and AI jobs, and earns ETH
fees plus LPT rewards. The on-chain participant that holds staked LPT.
Transcoder — The compute process that performs video encoding (or, via the AI runner, inference).
Has no on-chain identity; runs in-process or split out from the orchestrator.
Delegator — An LPT holder who bonds tokens to an orchestrator to share in its rewards without
running hardware.
Gateway — The demand-side node that aggregates application requests, selects orchestrators, and
pays for work. Out of scope for these docs, but it’s what sends you jobs.
Active set — The top orchestrators by total bonded stake (commonly 100) eligible to receive jobs
and inflation rewards in a round.
Staking & economics
LPT — The Livepeer Token. A work/coordination token used for staking, rewards, and governance — not used to pay for jobs (that’s ETH). Bond / Bonding — Attributing your LPT stake to an orchestrator. Tokens stay in theBondingManager contract; the operator never takes custody.
Unbond / Unbonding period — Starting a full exit. After unbonding you must wait the unbonding
period (currently 7 rounds) before withdrawing. Rebond cancels it.
Redelegate — Move bonded stake to a different orchestrator without the unbonding wait.
Reward cut (rewardCut) — The % of LPT inflation an orchestrator keeps; the rest goes to
delegators. Lower is better for delegators.
Fee share (feeShare) — The % of ETH fees an orchestrator passes to delegators. Higher is better
for delegators.
Reward call (reward()) — The once-per-round on-chain call that mints an orchestrator’s
inflation reward. Missing it forfeits that round for the whole pool, with no catch-up.
Claim earnings (claimEarnings()) — Checkpointing accrued rewards into your bonded balance.
Timing relative to the reward call matters.
Inflation — New LPT minted each round and distributed to bonded stake. The rate adjusts toward a
target bonding rate (~50%).
Treasury — An on-chain fund for community/public-goods spending, governed by proposal. Funded by
a cut of LPT inflation (LIP-92 set 10%, with a balance ceiling that pauses contributions when full).
Payments
Probabilistic micropayment (PM) ticket — How gateways pay. Each ticket has a face value and a win probability; orchestrators redeem only winning tickets on-chain for ETH. Expected earnings = face value × win probability. Round — The protocol’s accounting unit (~1 day). Governs active-set election, inflation, reward calls, and governance snapshots.Infrastructure
NVENC / NVDEC — NVIDIA’s hardware video encoder/decoder used for transcoding. Consumer GPUs cap concurrent NVENC sessions. AI runner — A Docker container that performs AI inference for a configured pipeline/model, spawned and managed by the orchestrator process. Pipeline — A category of AI task (e.g.text-to-image, audio-to-text, llm) mapped to
compatible models. Configured in aiModels.json.
Service URI / serviceAddr — The public address gateways use to reach an orchestrator, stored
on-chain via the ServiceRegistry.
Related
How the network works
See these terms in context.
Protocol parameters
The live values behind these concepts.