Improve Gateway Product To Meet Customer Needs

Author: Rick Staa, Livepeer Foundation

Funding Mechanism: On-chain Treasury - SPE Proposal

Submission URL: Apply Here

Winning Submission URL: TBD

Claimed By: TBD

1. Purpose

Livepeer needs an improved gateway product to respond to real-world customers and truly diversify demand.

This opportunity is to improve the gateway developer experience, providing an easier way for builders to build and deploy apps and services and onboard demand directly on the network at scale.

Currently Livepeer’s network demand is overly-reliant on gateways controlled by a handful of entities, mostly operated by Livepeer Inc. A healthy Livepeer network will have many gateway nodes run by many different entities sending many jobs to many Orchestrators. However, building and deploying a gateway is too complex for most builders currently.

Livepeer as a network has a clear opportunity to differentiate its offering against other generic compute providers, but it is currently not possible to capture this realtime opportunity. Working with key ecosystem demand partners (Daydream, Embody, Frameworks, Streamplace) alongside several new potential actors, this team is critical to the long-term success of the network.

2. Outcome

Overall success is when Livepeer improves its gateway offering to meet the needs of new customers wanting to build on the network.

The new gateway experience should make use of several concurrent an emerging developments: local gateways SDKs, observable network data, payments clearinghouses, and SLA-compliance communicating where they fit into the broader network product vision.

Developers should be able to onboard seamlessly to the Livepeer network with relevant SDKs, clear documentation and demo applications. The developer experience should be tested with 3-5 core design partners eager to build realtime applications directly on the network, with a concise report on how to unlock demand for the future.

Key Metrics To Measure The Outcome Against:

• Number of new demand-generating applications launching on the Livepeer network.

• Time to go from 0 to production-ready realtime AI application or service.

3. Requirements

Must have:

• Developer onboarding path: Steps mapped to take a builder from workflow definition to successful deployment of an app.

• Core runtime & SLA improvements: Measurable gains in workflow reliability, latency stability, failover behavior, and predictability under real-time workloads.

• Documentation and tutorials: Simple examples and walkthroughs showing how to go from 0 to 1 and bring demand to the network.

• SDK and tools: A well-designed SDK with examples, including CLI wrappers and sample apps that simplify common developer tasks.

• Customer-centric approach: Dedicated time taking meetings with potential customers fed by a concurrent BD team.

• Gateway Product Retro & Report: A clear report on the learnings from the initial testing, clarifying developer needs and opportunities for the future.

To explore:

• SDK Integration & Iteration: Use of local SDKs to validate how payment abstraction integrates with application workflows and inform SDK improvements.

• Crypto Payment Abstraction Module exploration: An MVP module encapsulating account-based crypto-abstracted payment flows handling real payment flows, balance tracking, and reporting.

• Usage dashboard - dashboard of network usage for developers, exploring collaboration with network observability team or a new account-based system.

• Diagnostics & error handling: Clear, actionable error reporting at the gateway interface to understand failures and routing behavior.

4. Proposal Guidelines

Your proposal must include the following in your proposal. Here is a guideline for what we are looking for: Livepeer RFP — Proposal Template

• Company Overview & Capabilities

• Experience and why you are a great fit for this work

• Milestones (with funding amount, timeline, deliverables, demo day for each)

• Outcomes

• Budget & Governance (how funds will be distributed)