Theta: The Next Generation Video and Entertainment Blockchain
If you are not a subscriber of The Crypto Intelligence Report, join other investors who get in-depth crypto content weekly and other perks only subscribers get access to.
Introducing Theta
Theta Network is the leading video delivery network powered by blockchain technology. Theta allows users to simultaneously watch video content and earn token rewards for relaying videos to other users who are also watching the same content. In the same vein as other sharing economy models, users opt-in to volunteering their spare bandwidth and computing resources to relay video to other users and earn token rewards for their contributions. Users can contribute to Theta Network on any PC, mobile device, or smart TV.
This more efficient way to deliver content that Theta Network created is called a peer-to-peer mesh network. Tokens on the Theta blockchain are used to encourage individual users to share their idle computing and bandwidth resources as caching or relay nodes for video streams. This design aims to improve the quality of stream delivery and solve the "last-mile" delivery problem, which is the main bottleneck for traditional content delivery pipelines, especially so for high-resolution, high bitrate 4k, 8k, and next-generation streams.
With sufficient network density, the majority of viewers will pull streams from peering caching nodes, allowing video platforms to significantly reduce content delivery network (CDN) costs. By introducing tokens as an end-user incentive mechanism, the Theta Network aims to allow video platforms to deepen viewer engagement, drive incremental revenues, and differentiate their content and viewing experience from their competitors.
Growth narrative
Nowadays, data consumption, especially via streaming, is omnipresent on the Internet and, therefore, in our daily lives. Whether it is video streaming platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, live streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube, or even music streaming platforms like Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, or Apple Music, bandwidth usage reaches new heights every year. Live video streaming accounts for over two-thirds of all internet traffic today, and systems must adapt quickly to be able to offer increased quality at a constant or even increasing speed and at the same cost.
However, with the current architectures, the users' growth, and the increase in video and audio quality, it is more and more difficult to offer a quality service for the same price to anyone in the world.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) play an important role in the video streaming ecosystem. It provides the backbone infrastructure to deliver the video streams to end viewers. Today's CDN lacks reach, causing video rebuffering, and high load times in many parts of the world. One major limitation of today's CDN networks is the so-called "last-mile" delivery problem. Typically, CDN providers build data centers called Point-of-Presence (POPs) in many locations around the world, with the expectation that these POPs are geographically close to the viewers.
However, the number of POPs is limited, hence are not near enough to the majority of viewers, especially in less developed regions. This "last-mile" link is usually the bottleneck of today's streaming delivery pipeline and often leads to a less optimal user experience, including choppy streams, bad picture quality, and frequent rebuffering.
On top of that, the data needs are skyrocketing. Users demand 4K, 8K, and higher quality streams creating an infrastructure bottleneck. In addition, the centralization of these services means less reliance, less revenue flowing back to content creators and platforms, and an architecture that is not very adaptable to demand variations.
source: ThetaToken.org
Theta's solution is a decentralized peer-to-peer video delivery system, a native blockchain-powered by users. Viewers earn rewards as Theta Fuel for sharing excess bandwidth and resources; viewers are rewarded for participating in the network. The tokens act as an incentive mechanism, as they relay video streams to other users. Theta Token motivates viewers to join the network as caching nodes. It also greatly improves the streaming market efficiency by streamlining the video delivery process. Within the Theta Network, advertisers can also directly target viewers at a lower cost.
This decentralized peer-to-peer network delivers streams efficiently globally through the Theta Mesh Delivery Network made up of the Peers. The result is a higher quality and smoother video streaming.
source: ThetaToken.org
Theta's protocol is already used in several services such as Theta.tv for live streaming content, especially in e-sport, Samsung VR for VR content, Cinedigm and Shout for Broadcasting and Entertainment, and PandoraTV for music, movies, and media.
With Theta's open-source network & protocol, all developers and partners can build their Dapps on it and benefit from its technologies and economic systems. From esports, music, TV, and movies to distance learning and peer-to-peer live streaming, Theta has the potential to power the next generation of streaming.
Innovation
The Theta blockchain introduced three main novel concepts:
Multi-Level BFT: A modified BFT consensus mechanism allows thousands of nodes to participate in the consensus process while still supporting very high transaction throughput (1,000+ TPS). The core idea is to have a small set of nodes, which form the validator committee, produce a chain of blocks as fast as possible using a PBFT-like process.
Then, the thousands of consensus participants, called guardians, finalize the chain generated by the validator committee at regular checkpoint blocks. The name multi-level BFT consensus mechanism reflects the fact that the validator/guardian division provides multiple levels of security guarantee. The validator committee provides the first level of consensus — with 10 to 20 validators, the committee can come to a consensus quickly. The guardian pool forms the second line of defense.
With thousands of nodes, it is substantially more difficult for attackers to compromise the integrity of the network and thus provide a much higher level of security. This mechanism achieves a good balance among transaction throughput, consistency, and level of decentralization, the three pillars of the so-called "impossible triangle".
Aggregated Signature Gossip Scheme: A basic all-to-all broadcasting of the checkpoint block hash could work between guardian nodes, but it yields quadratic communication overhead and therefore cannot scale to 1,000+ nodes. Instead, they propose an Aggregated Signature Gossip Scheme, which significantly reduces messaging complexity. Each guardian node keeps combining the partially aggregated signatures from all its neighbors and then gossips out the aggregated signature.
This way, the signature share of each node can reach other nodes at an exponential rate, leveraging the gossip protocol. In addition, the signature aggregation keeps the size of the node-to-node messages small and thus further reduces the communication overhead.
Resource-Oriented Micropayment Pool: An off-chain "Resource Oriented Micropayment Pool" that is purpose-built for video streaming. It allows a user to create an off-chain micropayment pool that any other user can withdraw from using off-chain transactions and is double-spend resistant. It is much more flexible compared to off-chain payment channels.
Theta's innovations are numerous, and every new version of the mainnet brings its share of innovations and technological novelties.
Edge on the market
Theta is not only an innovative and technologically advanced project, but it is also the only one currently offering such an advanced protocol. It is a project that has fulfilled its promises and evolved, and stayed on the edge of innovation.
With such a strong team of developers and blockchain experts, reputable and qualified advisors who have already proven themselves in their respective fields, and strong partnerships, Theta is many steps away from the competition. We can mention some important advisors who have helped the project to develop over the years:
Steve Chen
Co-founder of YouTube
Steve Chen was the co-founder and chief technology officer of YouTube. Steve was instrumental in building YouTube into a viral video phenomenon. He helped lead YouTube through the Google acquisition for $1.65 billion, less than a year after launching the site. As the key technologist, Steve developed the company’s massive data centers and helped build YouTube into a premier entertainment destination, and one of the most popular websites on the Internet today..
Justin Kan
Co-founder of Twitch
Justin Kan is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He is widely known for founding Twitch, a video game streaming platform acquired for $970 million by Amazon in 2014. Justin has founded various companies including Kiko, the first AJAX web calendar; Justin.TV, a live video streaming platform; Socialcam, a mobile video sharing app (Acquired for $60 million by Autodesk in 2012); and Exec, an on-demand home cleaning service (acquired by Handybook in 2014). He has additionally incubated two companies out of his home in the past 2 years: Alto (Formerly ScriptDash), a modern online pharmacy, and Whale, a video Q&A app. Justin personally invested in over 65 companies.
Kyle Okamoto
Chief Network Officer at Verizon Digital Media
Kyle Okamoto is the Chief Network Officer at Verizon Digital Media Services, overseeing the Network, Technology and Operations businesses and one of the original employees of the VDMS startup. Kyle has worked for Verizon for many years in a number of leadership roles as well as at several start-ups in the social enterprise and digital media space. He’s been instrumental in the AOL and Yahoo integration as well as the EdgeCast Networks, UpLynk and Volicon acquisitions that currently form the foundation of Verizon Digital Media Services.
Travis Skweres
Founder CoinMkt, one of the first US bitcoin exchanges
Travis Skweres is an early entrepreneur and investor player in cryptocurrencies. Travis was the CEO and Cofounder of CoinMKT, one of the first Bitcoin exchanges based in the United States. Operating from 2013 - 2015, CoinMKT achieved tens of thousands of users, millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin traded, and was acquired by ANX Hong Kong in 2015. Travis remains an active investor in the cryptocurrency community and is currently working on releasing his next cryptocurrency-related project. Travis clients have included Occidental Petroleum, The Home Depot, Blinds.com, NBC Universal, etc.
ThetaLabs also has the edge over the competition with legal and technical evidence on the functioning of their technologies by having filed eight patents to date in order to keep the lead and secure Theta Network as the first and only successful blockchain-based decentralized video protocol.
Competition
Livepeer
Livepeer is an Ethereum-based protocol that distributes video transcoding work throughout its decentralized network. The protocol aims to provide a cost-efficient, secure, and reliable infrastructure that can handle today's high demand for video streaming.
Theta would have a much higher adoption than Livepeer, even if they both started developing their project in 2017. In addition to adoption, Theta is way more accessible, has more use cases, and has strong technologies and products to show. Also, Livepeer is on Ethereum, which we know has scalability problems, while Theta is on its own Blockchain and does not suffer scalability or security problems running its own nodes.
NKN
NKN is a new kind of peer-to-peer network connectivity protocol and ecosystem powered by a novel public blockchain. It uses economic incentives to motivate Internet users to share network connections and utilize unused bandwidth. It is basically doing the same thing as Theta, but once again, without all the edges, Theta has, including trust and recognition of the crypto market and investors. With no use cases and no big partnerships, NKN is far from being a threat to Theta at its current state.
AIOZ
AIOZ is a Layer-1 Blockchain-based Content Delivery Network. AIOZ utilizes Blockchain to better content distribution through decentralization. A distributed Content Delivery Network (“dCDN”) uses Nodes for storing, streaming, and transferring data instead of traditional data centers operating on a P2P model.
AIOZ uses a faster, cheaper, and more robust platform for content streaming making it affordable, fast, and better quality. AIOZ is a pretty new project compared to Theta Less partnerships technologies are less mature. This could be a serious competitor in a few years, but for now, it does not have the edges that Theta has and does not offer a revolutionary technology that Theta would not have.
Team
Mitch Liu
Co-founder / CEO
Mitch Liu is a co-founder and the CEO of Theta Labs. He is an entrepreneur who previously co-founded Tapjoy, a successful mobile advertising and app monetization company still active to this day and with over 200 employees. He then co-founded a mobile social gaming studio before founding Theta TV, a blockchain livestreaming platform, that led to the founding of Theta Labs. Mitch also has a B.S. degree in Computer Science & Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Jieyi Long
Co-founder / CTO
Jieyi Long is a co-founder and the CTO of Theta Labs. He has a Ph.D in computer engineering and a B.S. degree in microelectronics. Jieyi worked at Synopsys, an American electronic design automation, for over 3 years. He also co-founded a gaming studio before devoting himself to his new project, Theta TV. In addition to that Jieyi developed multiple patented technologies including VR live streaming as well as instant replays for video games.
Ribao Wei
Principal Engineer
Ribao Wei is the principal engineer working at Theta Labs. He was a member of technical staff at Model N and Nutanix, Software and Cloud companies. Ribao also worked at Visa as a Senior Software Engineer. He has been working at Theta for over 4 years and has supervised and worked on many of the core components such as the consensus engine, data synchronization, smart contract virtual machine, EdgeCast, a decentralized live streaming Desktop application, Theta Vault, the middle layer between video platforms and Theta network, etc.
Partners & Backers
Many quality investors and VCs have invested in Theta since 2017, notably via private sales. Some of the many investors are the following:
Prestigious projects have made partnerships with Theta and decided to use its protocol, technologies, and Blockchain:
Katy Perry released her first set of NFTs on ThetaDrop, the Theta NFTs platform.
Metro Goldwin Mayer, Nasa, Lionsgate, World Poker Tour, and many others have reached agreements to broadcast their content on Theta.tv.
Theta Network and its gaming content go integrated on Ultra, allowing users to earn money by streaming live gaming sessions or watching other people playing.
Pandora.tv and Cinedigm are using Theta's protocol for their streaming apps.
Community
Size and engagement
Theta has over 250,000 followers on Twitter and 23,000 members on Discord.
source: Twitter
source: SocialBlade
Communication
source: SocialBlade
Theta is very active on social media, especially Twitter, and they usually get quite good engagement for their tweets. They communicate through AMAs, articles on their Medium, their website, and by announcing news and latest partnerships via Twitter. They also have a really clear website and documents (whitepaper and technical) for the mainnets and technologies they developed.
Price
Token Release Date
$THETA: January 17th, 2018$TFUEL: March 15th, 2019
Product Release Date
Theta Mainnet 1.0 – March 15th, 2019
Theta Mainnet 2.0 – May 27th, 2020
Theta Mainnet 3.0 – June 30th, 2021
Market Capitalization
$THETA: $3,025,208,000 – April 15th, 2022
$TFUEL: $879,432,000 – April 15th, 2022
ATL
$THETA: $0.03977 – March 13th, 2020
$TFUEL: $0.0008897 – March 13th, 2020
ATH
$THETA: $15.90 – April 16th, 2021
$TFUEL: $0.6807 – June 9th, 2021
TA Analysis
Exactly a year ago, $THETA was hitting all-time highs.
Let's see what changed and what we can expect from it:
Looking at the Weekly timeframe, two demand zones are clearly visible:
The first one played a significant bounce on a first tap; however, eventually, the price was accepted into it, and now $THETA is hanging around that zone.
Nevertheless, demand zone 2 is right under it, and it's way stronger, given that a while ago, that accumulation range was forming for over six weeks. And we do see that it's bouncing right off its top boundary.
Additionally, the 0.18-0.27 Fib range (known as the Investment range) completely aligns with that zone, which adds lots of strength and relevance to those price levels.
On top of all, from the ATH projects, we are offered a nearly 80% discount, so that's a no-brainer for many.
At the same time, a level at ~$4 is extremely important now, as it had been such strong support, but now it's being tested from below and acts as a strong resistance.
So the first major sign of strength would be to reclaim that level. No wonder that with the horizontal volume profile tool, we can see a high volume node (HVN) right there:
It is also clearly seen how well it's been responding to VAH and VAL over the last six months, so classically, we would expect a rotation pretty soon.
Having all of that at our disposal, we can conclude:
Demand Zone 2 and 18-27 Fib along with VAL range are extremely strong support, therefore - BUY.
$4 is the first obstacle to a solid rotation and change of structure; therefore - SELL 25%
POC of the whole yearly range - massive resistance, with lots of volumes traded, therefore - SELL 50%
If BTC helps and we see a strong bull cycle, split the remaining 25% for the last ATH (obvious resistance) and the moonbag that you get to keep and re-evaluate later.
Technical analysis of $THETA provided by Oleg Khodovskyi.
Roadmap
One of the biggest developments for Theta in 2022 will be the full launch of its ThetaDrop NFT marketplace. Plans on airdropping the $TDrop governance tokens to members of the Theta community start on February 1st, 2022.
ThetaDrop does not have any plans for a token sale and instead plans to release its 20 billion token supply over a four-year period to members of the community who provide NFT liquidity mining or stake $THETA, $TFUEL, and $TDrop on the network.
Theta also just announced the mainnet 4.0 that should be released in Q4 2022. Their vision on Web3 is even clearer, and they are inspired by what happened in crypto from a technological point of view to upgrade their technology for the new version of their mainnet.
They introduced the Theta Metachain, a network of interconnected subchains, a "chain of chains". They arrived at the conclusion that Each platform or Web3 business can have its own subchain that is highly customizable and effectively have its own uncongested chain structured to its needs, but unlike a private blockchain, it comes with transparency, security, and credibility of a public blockchain.
Similarly, media and entertainment companies can implement their own dedicated subchains with all the Web3 tools they require for video, computing, and storage, and with capacity solely for their platform and users, rather than be forced to share with others and competitors.
And with a native governance token tailored to their subchain allows access and governance to reside with the appropriate stakeholders in their ecosystem, not those of totally unrelated entities. Therefore, they had to adapt their technology to this latest vision.
Markets
CEX
$THETA is listed on most of the biggest exchanges:
$TFUEL is listed on slightly fewer exchanges:
Tokenomics
Distribution, vesting periods, circulating supply.
The total Supply of $THETA is 1,000,000,000, fully released and circulating.
Private sale is 30% of the total token supply, so 300,000,000 $THETA.
It was conducted at the early stages of Theta in Q4 2017 and raised a total of $20.0 million at ~$0.067 per token.Team was allocated 7.49% of the total token supply.
Advisors received 1.23% of the total tokens issued tokens.
Partners received 12.5% of the total tokens issued tokens.
Network Seeding received 12.5% of the total tokens issued tokens.
Labs Reserves constitute 36.28% of the total tokens issued tokens.
All tokens were released during 2018, which means that all selling pressure took place between 2018 and 2019, and most profits have been taken at this point.
Token Utility
Theta Token ($THETA): The staking and governance token of the Theta protocol. $THETA is used to stake as a Validator or Guardian node, contributing to block production and the protocol governance of the Theta Network. By staking and running a node, users will earn a proportional amount of the new $TFUEL generated. The supply of $THETA is fixed at 1 billion and will never increase.
Theta Fuel ($TFUEL): The operational token of the Theta protocol. $TFUEL is used for on-chain operations like payments to Edge Node relayers for sharing a video stream or for deploying or interacting with smart contracts. Relayers earn $TFUEL for every video stream they relay to other users on the network. You can think of Theta Fuel as the "gas" of the protocol. There were 5 billion $TFUEL at the genesis of the Theta blockchain, and the supply increases annually at a fixed % set at the protocol level, currently 5%.
Theta Drop ($TDROP): A new token $TDROP has been airdropped in January 2022 to $THETA holders. $TDROP is a new token natively built on the Theta blockchain that rewards NFT liquidity mining, provides decentralized governance via $TDROP staking, and rewards Theta validators and guardians. $TDROP is core to incentivizing more activity and volume of the ThetaDrop marketplace.
Not financial advice. The Crypto Intelligence Report is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Do your own research and make an informed decision.
📺 Upcoming Webinars for Institutional Investors
Stratmont Brothers CIO and The Stratmont Intelligence Report publisher Gavin Cornelius is hosting an upcoming 55-minute webinar on crypto investing for family offices, wealth managers, and financial advisors covering our thoughts on crypto investing in 2022, our digital asset trading strategies to generate outsized consistent returns in all market conditions, and a macro overview of the current state and future developments of the crypto hedge fund ecosystem.
Register for free below.
Thu April 28, 2022 9:00 PM SINGAPORE / 2:00 PM LONDON / 9:00 AM NEW YORK - Crypto Investing For Institutions: Generating Outsized Returns
📺 Free Masterclass for Investors in 2022
In this exclusive Masterclass dedicated to forward-thinking investors, Stratmont Brothers’ trading fund Founders Kevin Loebler and Gavin Dantez help you understand the current tumultuous economic situation and walk you through the wealth opportunities hidden behind it. Register now for free below.
Here are the articles we’ve released so far:
Visit our channel:
Website at StratmontBrothers.com
Substack at Stratmontbrothers.substack.com
Masterclass at Stratmontbrothers.com/masterclass
Please share with your friends and colleagues.