Monthly Wrap-up: August 2026

Each month, this roundup collects the news from across Livepeer: the protocol, the teams funded by the community treasury, and the people building on the network.

In August, Network Engineering finished its three-month pilot and asked the treasury for $230k to keep going through December, and Protocol R&D moved into its second phase. Orchestrators also got a way to keep their keys offline.

Protocol

• Protocol R&D skips its August release. Nothing was ready to ship. Activity on Immunefi, the bug bounty platform, more than doubled.

Ecosystem

• Orchestrators can now keep their keys in cold storage. livepeer.bot, a shared service on Arbitrum One, calls rewards on their behalf using LIP-118.
• WEAVE's Livepeer Agent Hackathon is live. 8 registrations so far. Punch Compute is stable, with payments next.

Funded work

• Network Engineering wraps its pilot on schedule. The three-month pilot delivered 11 pieces of work and published its full budget.
• Network Engineering proposes a second round. It asks for $230k for September to December, across four tracks with named owners.
• Protocol R&D closes Phase 1 with a retrospective, ending its Q1–Q2 term.
• Payment Clearinghouse publishes its Builder API. Milestone 3 is complete, covering the admin API and per-user usage endpoints.
• Subgraph audit delivered.

Treasury & governance

• The treasury reward-cut debate reopens. A proposal to again send 10% of staking rewards to the treasury is back. Nobody objects to restoring it; the argument is over the cap.

What's next

• Network Engineering SPE II: its first milestones are due in mid-September, if the proposal goes ahead.
• The Payment Clearinghouse: documentation and a retrospective will close out its last two milestones.

For roadmap progress this month, see the August changelog. Funded teams can get their news into next month's roundup by posting their monthly update in their proposal's forum thread.