What is Theta?: The Beginner’s Guide

The live-streaming industry is one of the fastest growing internet segments, growing from $ 30.3 billion in 2016 to $ 70 billion by the end of this year.

Online viewers are increasingly consuming live and pre-recorded video content through YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, and many other platforms. The next area for online streaming could be blockchain-based video delivery platforms. One of them, Theta Network (the THETA control token is currently the 18th most popular cryptocurrency in the world after market capitalization), launches its mainnet 3.0 today. What is Theta and what does the future hold for us?

What is Theta?

It is a native blockchain that uses an open-source protocol, which means that developers and partners can build decentralized network applications just like Ethereum. A decentralized peer-to-peer video delivery network, powered by blockchain technology, which allows free delivery of high bandwidth content. When a user watches a video, some computing power is used to send that video to other users, and the primary user receives tokens as a reward. The Network aims to become the next generation of entertainment technology, offering a decentralized video streaming infrastructure that is cheaper than competing centralized platforms. The peer-to-peer video platform is user-centric and offers a variety of content, including eSports, movies, TV series and music.

How It Works?

It is blockchain network that is based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, allowing participants to be rewarded with real-time payments for content distribution. The network also allows developers to build DApps on open-source blockchain protocols. It uses a consensus mechanism of the concept similar to the blockchain protocol of Tender mint, based on staking. This means that participants block a large amount of THETA chips in order to have the authority to process transaction blocks. It network operates through three categories of participants:

Enterprise Validator Node

These are companies that use its chips to process network transactions. Some of the most popular validation nodes in the network are Sony, the Creative Artists Agency talent repository, Google and Samsung. Validation nodes are the first line of defense of the network and require participants to bet 1 million coins.

Guardian Notes

Guardian nodes are community nodes responsible for maintaining consensus by providing validation at predefined points. Users who ensure the correctness of transaction blocks generated by enterprise validation nodes and add a second level of security to the protocol. If a malicious block passes through the validator node, the protection node blocks it. 

Edge Notes

Edge nodes allow users to send video streams from it.tv and share streaming bandwidth. They will receive a TFUEL award for their support of the network. Its network allows users to deliver peer-to-peer content without a centralized delivery network.

How its two main chips work: THETA and TFUEL

One of the things that makes it stand out is that she has two default chips. TFUEL is trading at $ 0.43 per coin at the time of writing and has a market capitalization of $ 2.3 billion. and it trades at $ 7.20 and has a market capitalization of $ 7.2 billion.

Network participants who help share video content to marginal nodes are rewarded for data sent through TFUEL. The platform pays for the content distribution itself, so the service is free for end users.

Marginal nodes typically transmit small amounts of videos, rather than full-length videos, so end users see content streamed from multiple nodes in the community. Like BitTorrent, torrent users get paid in exchange for the appearance of the content and the contribution to the download speed of other parties.

The second cryptocurrency of its network, THETA, is a governance symbol designed to manage the blockchain and evolve in the future. It eliminates the risk of inflation by providing a fixed supply of 1 billion coins.

You can get TFUEL as a reward by betting coins, but a minimum of 1000 tokens is required for a user to become a valid tutor node and 1 million tokens to become an enterprise-level validator.