- Theta Labs is running a unique project, combining crypto and esports streaming
- By sharing their bandwidth, viewers can earn precious cryptocurrencies
- The founders will aim to make the project more decentralized
Theta Labs combines video game streaming in cryptocurrency in a whole new experience.
Theta Combines Game Streaming and Cryptocurrency
The Theta blockchain project has found a way to make cryptocurrencies appealing to people in the gaming community. It provides peer-to-peer video streaming and makes it worthwhile for viewers. It works by taking stream viewers’ unused bandwidth and rewarding them with its two signature cryptocurrencies.
Theta’s streaming platform currently boasts about a million users. Although the number is not quickly growing, it’s not fluctuating downwards either. Theta has instead built a stable user base that has been helping the project grow. The project has some major allies in the faces of Samsung Electronics and Sony Group. Additionally, Theta’s advisors include co-founders of YouTube and Twitch.
The Theta token, which used to cost some mere 4 cents, rose to as much as $6.22 (at the time of this writing). Theta’s market value rose to $6 billion.
The project is created by esports streaming enthusiasts and is marketed towards the gaming community as a whole. By watching live streams, users can share their bandwidth and be rewarded with the project’s secondary cryptocurrency: Theta Fuel tokens.
The Tfuel tokens are currently estimated to have a value of $2 billion, with a single token costing about $0.36 at the time of this writing.
Watch and Earn
As mentioned before, Theta.tv viewers can share their bandwidth while watching video game streams and be rewarded with precious TFuel tokens.
According to Theta Labs’ CEO Mitch Liu, a dedicated viewer can get as much as $10 each month, which can be a lot by some countries’ standards. He also revealed that Theta.tv’s average viewer spends about an hour per day.
Liu says he doesn’t have an interest in competing with YouTube and instead wants Theta to be its own thing that provides a wide range of unique services and features. Theta even got the famous pop singer Katy Perry to make non-fungible tokens of her performances that will be added to the blockchain.
The people behind Theta have launched a decentralized exchange in the hopes of getting to partner with decentralized finance apps. Liu is hopeful that two of the top such apps, Uniswap and Compound, will join Theta as they can run on it without the need of recoding.
Currently, Theta is still centralized. It owns 15 main validator nodes and thousands of Guardian nodes. Theta is in possession of 20% of the Theta tokens.
The Theta project started in 2015 as an esports streaming site Silver.tv. Despite gaining a following, the founders realized that the video quality was less than perfect. It was then that they decided to switch to the blockchain approach. In 2017 they ran a private token sale and raised $20 million for the inner restructuring.
Bloomberg Opinion’s writer Aaron Brown described Theta as a strong contender in a field with many competitors. There are currently some major rivals to Theta in the faces of Livepeer, VideoCoin, and BitTorrent.
However, Theta and its supporters are optimistic about the future. They aim to create a whole new decentralized streaming bandwidth ecosystem. According to Ali Farahanchi, this is a whole new way of doing business.
Theta is one of the endeavors that mark esports’ intertwinement with other industries, such as cryptocurrency, gambling, and even fashion. In recent times one of the big tournament organizers, BLAST Premier partnered with Coinbase to popularize crypto among video game fans.
