livepeer / livepeer/research

Offchain Job Negotiation

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Description

Currently, transcoding jobs are created by broadcasters and assigned to the transcoders by the protocol based on the stake of the transcoders and the price of the job. While this is a nice mechanism to help transcoders calculate estimated revenue from transcoding fees, it takes away the ability for the broadcaster to pick their own transcoder, and therefore, goes against open competition.

An alternative way to do job assignment is to allow the broadcaster to negotiate with the transcoder offchain, similar to how 0x works for token transactions. This, however, potential changes the economics of the protocol because the transcoder stake now no longer guarantee a proportional amount of jobs (and fees).

A deeper analysis is needed to decide whether offchain job negotiation is good for the protocol, and how to make it cryptoeconomically secure.

Follow the discord discussion [here](https://discord.gg/pVBV2Nd).

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the current protocol rules for broadcaster-created jobs, transcoder assignment, stake, and pricing. Read the linked Discord discussion for existing context, then compare offchain negotiation with the current assignment model and document the economic and cryptoeconomic questions that must be answered.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
blockchain
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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