Theta Development Roadmap 2020— Updated
Now that Theta Mainnet 2.0 is launched and Guardian Node staking is live, Theta Network is more secure and more decentralized than ever. More than 1,240 Guardian Nodes are now up and running, and the total THETA staked to the network is more than 496m THETA! After reviewing plans for the rest of the year, we’ve made a few changes to the development roadmap for the rest of 2020.
The biggest areas of focus will be improving the usability of Theta Network for content creator and streaming platforms. For content creators, it means building out the Theta Edge Node so that fully-decentralized streams can be broadcast (codenamed ‘Anycast’) to Theta users that can’t be censored. In the Edge Node’s current beta form, you can set up your own livestream and broadcast directly to other Theta Edge Nodes entirely peer to peer — with no CDN involved. It might seem pretty basic, but this is actually the core on which entirely decentralized streaming platforms could be based on. Next steps will be to add ways to share your stream IDs with other Edge Nodes (if you choose to), notify followers that you are going live, and even message other Edge Node users fully p2p. The goal is to provide the underlying pieces so that anyone can build their own decentralized streaming site or app around the Edge Node infrastructure — for content that can’t be de-platformed, censored, or otherwise restricted.
For existing platforms with their own content rights libraries, adding smart contracts to Theta mainnet will enable decentralized DRM via non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This way content rights holders can let their content be shared over Theta Network without fear of piracy. Think of a movie studio that distributes their movies over an online streaming platform to users who purchase/rent them, or a concert promoter that sells access to live concerts from major recording artists. They are highly concerned about piracy when considering p2p video sharing. By providing NFTs to each legitimate paying customer, these content rights holders can get comfortable distributing their content p2p without fearing piracy or other illegal distribution of the content they own.
Q2 2020
- Theta Mainnet 2.0 goes live with Multi-BFT consensus mechanism and growing number of enterprise validator nodes
- Guardian Nodes launch on Theta Mainnet 2.0
- Smart Contracts Sandbox testnet released
- THETA.tv app releases on AndroidTV platform
Q3 2020
- Video-on-Demand (VOD) streaming added to THETA.tv
- Release of generalized Turing-complete smart contract support to testnet_sapphire
- Beta of “Anycast” Theta Edge Node platform (previously Universal Edge Cacher) featuring local ingest and encoding of streams, end-to-end decentralized streaming, decentralized chat and event notifications
- Beta of Theta blockchain data repository using ETL / Google BigQuery
Q4 2020
- Release of generalized Turing-complete smart contracts to Theta Mainnet 2.0
- Release of “Anycast” Theta Edge Node platform
- Beta of Theta oracle feed to increase transparency to stakeholders including advertisers, publishers and content creators
- Beta of decentralized DRM (digital rights management) system for permissioned streams, using NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as DRM authentication method to purchase and access encrypted digital content
2021 and beyond
- Coming soon
Throughout Q3 and Q4, we’ll share more updates on where we see the Theta project heading, progress on the roadmap, and what’s to come in 2020. We’ll also be highlighting community projects that are building out the Theta ecosystem, and how you can get involved to help build Theta Network yourself (or jump into the Theta GitHub and Theta Hackathon today!)
Cheers,
the Theta team
