THETA Price & Live Chart

About Theta

Theta is the token used by the Theta network. The network aims to create a decentralised means of storing and sharing video, and has earned plaudits from established names like YouTube Founder Steve Chen.

The rise of video streaming arrived at around the same time as a widespread enthusiasm for blockchain and all things crypto; it’s the goal of the Theta blockchain to synthesise the two technologies and deliver video-on-demand without the cumbersome, centralised infrastructure.

• Theta is among the newest of the cryptocurrencies, having been established in 2017.
• The Theta platform is led by Mitch Liu, co-founder of the SLIVER.tv streaming site — which is a little bit like Twitch.
• Theta has a total supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens.
• Theta is supplemented by Theta Fuel, which is a separate currency used to reward those who share their computational resources.

What's the goal of Theta?

The system is designed to solve a major problem with streaming video today. The content in question is bottlenecked through clusters of proxy servers called content delivery networks, or CDNs. So, having chosen to view a given video on YouTube or Netflix, the platform in question will send an instruction to the appropriate local CDN. But the demand from users for uncompressed 4K and even 8K content has begun to outstrip the legacy infrastructure — meaning buffering and compression at the user end.

Peer-to-peer video delivery aims to change that. By sharing excess bandwidth with the network, viewers are rewarded for participation. Rather than streaming a given video from a centralised server, you’ll instead stream it from other users of a given video platform.

How does Theta work?

The Theta network is comprised of nodes, each of which is a user with the hardware necessary to view and stream video content. These nodes are called ‘caching’ nodes, a little bit like the cache memory on your computer’s CPU. They store little bits of video, and send them to viewers around the world. A system like this means that individual data packets don’t have to be sent as far, reducing the likelihood of bottlenecks and buffering issues.

Why is peer-to-peer better?

If you are familiar with the advantages of BitTorrent then you might understand exactly why this method of sharing is desirable. If 100 people need to get the same file from the same server, the server doesn’t need to send the file 100 times. It could instead carve the file up into 1% portions and send one to each user.

The users then begin to send the missing pieces to one another until eventually they’ve all got the complete file. This sharing process can be such that the entire group isn’t reliant on any one person; if a single user drops out midway through, their share of the data would already have been shared, making the entire thing progressively more robust.

In the Theta network, nodes that participate in this way are rewarded with TFuel tokens as an incentive to continue sharing, making the network better for everyone. According to the Theta 2.0 white paper released in 2018, this could lead to a reduction in costs of around 80%.

Note that TFuel is a separate currency from the main Theta, but the prices of the two are very closely correlated.

Aside from the technical advantages, there are censorship and monetisation issues to think about. On a wholly decentralised video sharing platform, creators wouldn’t need to worry about their videos being taken down, or demonetized.

Where does the blockchain come in?

The Theta blockchain is built to work behind the scenes of the Theta network, providing a consensus mechanism for the reward system. It does this via a version of the proof-of-stake mechanism, which is distinct from the proof-of-work used by currencies like Bitcoin and LiteCoin. Rather than having the machine perform an arbitrarily complex task, individuals are rewarded depending on how much they have ‘staked’, or the number of coins they have for the block being mined.

This is made slightly more complicated by the addition of a few extra details, including what’s called Multi-level Byzantine Fault Tolerance. These details go beyond the scope of this primer.

What effects the price of Theta?

The feasibility of Theta’s peer-to-peer video sharing technology has an enormous impact on the price of a given token. If it were a certainty that Theta was going to take over the world of shared digital content then the price of the tokens would be orders of magnitude higher than it is today. You can therefore take the current price of a token as a reflection of investor certainty that this will ultimately prove to be the case. It’s for this reason that the involvement and endorsement of companies like Google and Samsung is so consequential when it comes to the price of a given coin.

Theta Price History

In late December 2020, the price of Theta more than tripled from $0.65 to $2.10. By April, it had shot up again to an impressive $10, establishing itself as among the fastest growing cryptocurrencies available.

This came on the back of several years of steady development, a highlight of which was Google’s endorsement of the infrastructure and business model, which came in the form of a partnership between the search-engine giant and Theta Labs.

The involvement of Big Tech has had a reliable upward effect on the price of Theta. In May 2020, Samsung announced that the Theta.tv streaming platform would be finding its way on to millions of smartphones, pushing the currency up beyond the $0.40 mark for the first time.

Theta Price Prediction

You can find the current price reflected in the Theta chart. Whether it goes up or down in the future is a matter of speculation, and investors must accept a degree of risk whenever they buy or sell any currency (or any commodity at all). There’s reason to believe that the rise of Theta is linked to the boom in Nonfungible Tokens (NFTs), and so any prediction is predicated on that continuing. Many investors predict a bullish future for the token, pushing up into $20 territory before the end of the year.