About the Protocol

The SugarBlock Protocol defines how the various actors in a live streaming ecosystem participate in a secure and economically rational way. The two major areas that the protocol needs to address are the actual distribution of live video from the source to a large number of consumers in a performant and scalable way, and the economic incentives for encouraging participation in the network in a secure and game-theoretic manner. While this whitepaper will touch on the live video distribution itself where overlapping with the economic protocol, it will largely focus on the latter in order to demonstrate security and economic alignment. At the highest level, the protocol is designed to:

• Allow any node to send a live video into the network, and optionally pay to have it transcoded into various formats and bitrates.

• Allow any node to request the video from the network.

• Allow participants to contribute their processing power and bandwidth in service of transcoding and distribution of video, and to be compensated accordingly.

In a decentralized network where participants are rewarded in proportion to the amount of work that they contributed, the two big challenges that need to be addressed to ensure security are:

• Can it be verified that the work that the nodes did was done correctly?

• Are the nodes being awarded for real work that contributed value to the network, as opposed to fake work done in an attempt to gain token allocations unfairly?

The SugarBlock protocol is designed to address both the verification of work and the prevention of fake work, while also offering solutions for automatic scalability of the network and baked in governance for protocol evolution over time.