The Theta Network (THETA) is the cryptocurrency of the leading streaming service on the blockchain

Blockchain is reforming traditional business areas such as logistics, medicine and copyright. With the arrival of next-generation blockchain platforms, the rapidly growing streaming industry is now being added to these areas.

The video streaming industry is predicted to grow by an average of 20 percent annually until 2027.

What is Theta Network?

The Theta Network is a blockchain platform for streaming video content or, in other words, a crypto-streaming service based on smart contracts. Theta Network is a decentralized analogue of well-known services like YouTube or Netflix.

The Theta Labs team created the platform, which received a patent for its innovative decentralized network for streaming video content in September 2021. The Theta Network is currently the first and only successful implementation of a decentralized video protocol based on blockchain technology.

Work on the blockchain platform began in 2017 when Mitch Liu and Jay Long founded the project. They were also joined by co-founders Steven Chen (YouTube), Justin Kan (Twitch), and Verizon executives Rakuten Wiki and CJ Hellow.

The Theta Network was designed to improve video streaming and, at the same time, encourage users to share content, which is very similar to the Torrent network. The Theta Network is also designed to reduce data maintenance costs and provide efficient management of video content storage to achieve high performance when streaming media content.

In 2022, the Theta Labs team launched Theta Metachain, a network of interconnected blockchains aimed at increasing the scalability of Theta Network. With Metachain, the network can achieve, in theory, unlimited bandwidth and block completion times of 1-2 seconds.

How is the Theta Network blockchain structured?

The Theta Network comprises two complementary subsystems:

the Theta Blockchain, which, with the help of smart contracts, is responsible for distributing user rewards and running the payment system;
the Theta Edge Network is an edge network that provides storage and delivery of media content, including video and images.

The Theta Blockchain is a decentralized solution based on its unique multi-level consensus mechanism, providing blockchain network security and high performance.

The Theta Network's smart contracts are Turing-complete, allow the creation of decentralized applications (DApps), and are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

There are four types of nodes in the Theta Network blockchain:

Edge Nodes and Elite Edge Nodes are user nodes that store on the network and share their content with other users. Edge Nodes share content with other users and get rewarded in TFUEL tokens. Back in 2021, there were over 130,000 edge nodes.
Validator Nodes are the classic nodes that perform transaction validation and add new blocks.
Guardians Nodes: manage the validator network, identifying and eliminating unscrupulous validators who seek to disrupt the blockchain network. Keeper nodes are also rewarded with TFUEL tokens for their work.
Enterprise Validator Nodes are validator nodes operated by large companies that perform the same functions as regular validators but have a minimum staking amount of 1,000,000 THETA. The Theta Network has more than 15 such nodes operated by large, well-known companies: Google, Sony, Samsung, and Binance are among them.

The Theta Edge Network is an innovative content storage and delivery system with over 130,000 nodes. The main goal of Theta Edge Network is to make the Internet more decentralized, secure and accessible. With Theta Video API, all users can embed content into their resources without restrictions. And here, we smoothly move to the problems of centralized services.

Have you often come across that YouTube, for example, does not allow you to watch video content on a third-party site and requires you to go to your resource to do so? This concerns the limitations of centralized sites.

Another problem lies in the encouragement of users: centralized services like YouTube take a significant part of video bloggers' income for themselves. This is especially true for beginner bloggers, who do not receive any pay for video views until they reach a certain level. This, in turn, makes it very difficult to develop the channel, as newbie bloggers have to bear only the costs of content promotion without rewards, and it is very difficult for them to find sponsors. The Theta Network aims to eliminate this problem and distributes rewards fairly regardless of user popularity.

Tokenomics

The Theta Network currently has three tokens:

THETA,
TFUEL,
TDROP.

The Theta Network team has developed its standard for creating tokens on its blockchain, TNT-20.

THETA is a management token used for staking and securing a decentralized network. The token was created on the Ethereum blockchain under the ERC-20 standard but was migrated to its blockchain in 2019. 1 000 000 THETAs have been issued and are already circulating on the market. THETA ranks 55th with a capitalisation of $903 million and a token exchange rate of ~$0.9.

TFUEL is a utility token used to reward validators and content providers. Unlike the THETA token, TFUEL has unlimited issuance. More than 6.35 billion TFUELs are circulating on the market, and the token's price is $0.04.

TDROP is an alternative management token to reward the NFT marketplace ThetaDrop activity. Unlike THETA and TFUEL, which can be purchased on Binance, KuCoin, Gate.io and other major marketplaces, the TDROP token is traded on a limited number of exchanges: Bithumb, Gate.io, ThetaSwap and Korbit. TDROP has a capitalization of only $17 million and a price of $0.001.

Conclusion

The Theta Network is actively expanding: in addition to its decentralized network, the project team has already launched Metachain, Theta.tv and VOD services, and NFT trading marketplace ThetaDrop. The team also plans to launch the EdgeStore in Q4 2023 and work on improving Theta Edge Network in 2024.