Esports crypto streaming service turns bandwidth into profit

• Theta is a blockchain project that underpins a peer-to-peer video streaming network that rewards many of its 1 million monthly users in exchange for unused bandwidth.
• Theta’s market value has risen to about $ 6 billion and is in the top 20 digital tokens.
• Unlike many other major crypto projects such as Bitcoin, Theta is still highly centralized.

One of the biggest knocks on most cryptocurrencies is that they have little real benefit other than speculation.

For digital token theta, blockchain projects support peer-to-peer video streaming networks that reward many of their 1 million monthly users in exchange for unused bandwidth. According to data from CoinMarketCap.com, after rising more than 300% this year, Theta’s market value has risen to about $ 6 billion, making it one of the top 20 digital tokens.

Sony and Samsung Electronics are one of the industry giants behind the efforts developed by esports livestreaming startups. Investors such as Sony are also betting coins. This is the process used to assist in validating transactions that create new blocks on the blockchain network. In exchange, they receive rewards in the form of secondary tokens called TFuel. TFuel has increased in value to approximately $ 2 billion.

” [Theta] Tokens have increased more than 100 times since we invested, “said Samuel Harrison, managing partner of Blockchain.com Ventures. This partner holds shares, holds coins, and acts as a verifier of transactions. Cent. It’s about $ 6 now.

Theta network users can not only watch live streams and movies of video games such as MGM, but also share bandwidth with others to earn Tfuel tokens.

“Heavy viewers can get $ 5 to $ 10 a month,” Mitch Riu, CEO of Thetarabo, said in an interview. “It’s important in developing countries, and it pays half of your Netflix subscription,” he said, with the average user of Theta.tv watching for about 63 minutes a day.

Theta’s audience hasn’t grown, but Liu says it has been stable for years. “We made a strategic decision not to compete with YouTube,” he said. The co-founder of YouTube and Twitch is one of the company’s advisors.

Instead, the company is expanding the range of services it offers. It’s also built into NFT, a non-fungible token. These are usually digital arts recorded on the blockchain. Singer Katy Perry said this week that she would make her performance NFT available on the network and acquire a private stake in the company. Theta Labs has also launched a decentralized exchange, hoping for a more decentralized financial (DeFi) app that users can borrow, lend, and trade on a peer-to-peer basis.

“Both Compound and Uniswap can run on Theta without any code changes,” Liu said of two of the most popular DeFi apps launched on rival blockchain Ethereum.

Unlike many other major crypto projects such as Bitcoin, Theta is still highly centralized. Theta Labs owns about half of the 16 main validator nodes that create blocks. However, there are also thousands of so-called Guardian nodes that anyone can set up to check if the transaction was processed correctly and finalize the block. Theta Labs owns 20% of all Theta supplies and private TFuel tokens.

When Liu and his co-founder Jieyi Long founded the company in 2015, it was called Sliver.tv and was to focus on live virtual reality streaming for video game tournaments. With millions of users of streaming services in Brazil and Eastern Europe, we found that delivering video to these parts of the world was expensive and the quality of the video was poor. As a result, the company moved to using blockchain for video distribution and held a $ 20 million private token sale in late 2017 for Sliver.tv’s subsidiary Theta Labs.

Faced with many competitors in the video category, such as VideoCoin and Livepeer. Cryptographic company Tron owns BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing software for video.

Cryptographic investor Aaron Brown, a contributor to the Bloomberg Opinion, said: “The price is basically tracking Bitcoin and there is no big ups and downs. The tech news is fine, but not overwhelming.”

But theta stock investors like venture capital firm DHVC are believers, not speculators.

“This isn’t just a financial incentive or goal, it’s actually creating a new ecosystem,” DHVC partner Ali Farahanchi said in an interview. “This is a new way to do business when you have a streamer who can provide compute time to your network. It’s a kind of decentralized streaming. We’re just getting started.”