Livepeer Prepares to Unlock New Way for GPU Miners to Earn Crypto

By the end of this year, GPU miners could have a fresh new way to earn crypto without any opportunity cost.

Decentralized video-streaming startup Livepeer debuted its Streamflow testnet on Tuesday, and miners and developers are working with the company to test video transcoding using idle chips already built into graphics processing units.

"The millions of GPUs out there that are mining cryptocurrency, ethereum, zcash, grin, monero, they have video encoding on those chips that can't hash cryptocurrency," Doug Petkanics, Livepeer's founder, explained to CoinDesk in a phone call.

In other words, if a mining farm is mining monero, it can keep doing that.

"For miners, it's additional revenue that comes at almost no opportunity cost," he said, something Livepeer has been promising for some time now.

Miners can now start testing the current implementation to help the Livepeer team get it to a reliable build.

He wrote in an email, "The current version of Livepeer only supports CPU based encoding. So the 'miners' performing the work are not simultaneously mining cryptocurrency like they can in the new release."

People who hold Livepeer's LPT tokens can delegate them to network participants to earn more crypto and provide security to the network.

It's using probabilistic micropayments in order to pay miners.

Petkanics acknowledged that miners who join the testnet now won't earn any returns for doing so.