In the beginning, there were open protocols. Among them was Facebook’s Open Graph, the “subject-verb-object language of everything you did online,” remembered early Facebook Product Manager, Antonio García Martínez, in his memoir and New York Times bestseller, Chaos Monkeys. “Rather than merely express some vague approval via Like, Facebook users could now broadcast everything they were doing, with the aid of outside developers who built Facebook’s new grammar into their products.”  

Back then, before the IPO, there was interest at Facebook in tying “all the consumer experiences together with the social network” in mutually beneficial ways. But in the pre-IPO revenue crisis, Facebook’s ad products were prioritized, Open Graph was “somewhat-forgotten” and ‘mutually beneficial’ was subsequently all but erased from the capitalist lexicon.

Since then, most tech behemoths have shuttered their open protocols, stonewalling those would-be “new grammar” developers. 

Among those affected was Wildcard. The infrastructure platform helped publishers push their content into mobile channels – “inside of Facebook, inside of Google search results, inside of Twitter tweets, inside of Pinterest pins,” co-founder Doug Petkanics said, speaking from a sunny, plant-laden room in his Westchester home. 

“We built our business around that. And then they closed off access, and made publishers work directly with them and integrate with their platforms,” he continued. “We got cut out of the future.”

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Petkanics graduated from Penn in 2006 with a degree in Computer Science. Prior to Wildcard, he co-founded the geo-location startup Hyperpublic, which Groupon acquired in 2012. Wildcard was his second venture with co-founder Eric Tang. After getting “cut out,” the duo turned to an open development project whose access couldn’t be so easily switched off.

“[Ethereum] had this superpower where you could embed economic incentives into open source software,” Petkanics said. It could motivate people to use the software, contribute to building it, run it to form networks and “actually benefit [them] when those networks were used.”

Listen: DeCent People Podcast With Doug Petkanics of Livepeer

Inspired, Tang and Petkanics started building prototypes. One was an auction marketplace for what they called “non-fungible unique goods,” or “NFUGs” (this was two years before the non-fungible token – i.e. NFT – standard was created).

But they saw video as the big opportunity. At Wildcard, they had “felt the pain and the expense” of working with video. It accounted for 80 percent of the Internet’s traffic, yet it remained a particularly “heavy form of media.”

Its market was also nearly impenetrable. Building a video experience meant competing with YouTube and Twitch – while paying the platforms’ parent companies, Google and Amazon, to use their cloud infrastructure. No matter what, they won.

“So we said, ‘hey, can we use these really powerful primitives to – for the first time – create an open, scalable video infrastructure that's not owned by Google or Amazon?” Petkanics said. “When we convinced ourselves that it was [possible], we planted a flag and we've been building for seven plus years towards the mission.” 

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At the end of 2016, they founded Livepeer to build the “world’s open video infrastructure.” Open infrastructure meant assembling a decentralized peer network. Responding to Livepeer’s token incentives, node operators began contributing their “graphics processing units” (i.e. GPUs – specialized processors that handle complex computing tasks) to transcode video – the operation that makes video “heavy.”

After building the network, they developed Livepeer Studio, a suite of products that caters to various video needs – from on demand to live streaming. And these solutions weren’t limited to blockchain companies.

Among Livepeer’s clientele is Brooklyn-based online radio station The Lot Radio, which streams DJs 24/7. After Vimeo axed its 24/7 product, the independent station sought a fallback. Livepeer arrived via Google search – and it worked not because it was decentralized, but because “overall, it does the job” and “the price is really affordable,” said Lot Radio founder Francois Vaxelaire.

Check out Livepeer's web site

Livepeer leverages crypto-economic incentives to tap into the idle video transcoding capabilities of the GPUs in their network. Decentralization is what keeps costs low and gives Livepeer its competitive edge, but to many, that element isn’t visible – or even notable. “A lot of our users actually might not be aware of – or care about – decentralization,” Petkanics explained, “or that the blockchain’s powering [Livepeer].”

Others do. Origin Stories – a recent Livepeer grant recipient – uses the blockchain to coordinate fan-sourced, AI-generated visuals at live shows. The startup is part of a cadre of projects testing Livepeer AI, a new feature that allows developers to embed generative AI into their applications. Over the past six months, Livepeer has been building an AI subnet, running nodes that focus specifically on AI video processing. 

“People are going to be able to create videos from prompts – you're going to be able to type or say a few lines of text and generate videos,” Petkanics said. “And that's going to change entertainment, advertising, communication – everything.”

During Singapore’s Token2049 conference this week, Livepeer is opening the AI subnet to the broader community. Petkanics thinks it will become a major part of the company’s future. “[AI video generation] requires a ton of compute and a lot of GPUs,” he said. “And it just so happens, [AI’s] the future of video and Livepeer is a huge network of GPUs that does compute on video.”

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On the call, Petkanics had just learned that Livepeer powered the live streams for Burning Man. “They built on Livepeer and didn't tell us,” he said, smiling.

Burning Man was founded on principles of mutual benefit – like “radical inclusion” and “decommodification.” But in recent years, nearby Silicon Valley has exerted its influence, and the Playa has been gilded in a commercial glaze. Instagram culture and tech’s worldview have shoved aside its humanist roots.

It’s a reminder of the monumental task that is displacing the technocracy. To compete with economies of scale, principles are not enough. But ideas like Bitcoin and Burning Man provide new primitives, atop which new grammar can emerge. And only the language of mutual benefit will ensure that no one gets cut out of the future again.