I was about one minute into reading a white paper describing an Ethereum Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for a video streaming blockchain project when I reached an obvious conclusion: this isn’t possible.

It was the speed with which that conclusion was reached that made me suspicious of my own suspicion and so I carried on, slogging through the incredibly vague document with its promises of technical solutions to the very big problem of video content distribution and monetization.

After completing the task I went back to their site to see how convincing their white paper had actually been: they had raised 5,056.162 ETH / 271.346 BTC.

$2.77 million dollars.

I present to you: monvid streaming platform.

The Pitch: A Blockchain-based Video CDN

The monvid platform is a decentralized community network which uses the blockchain technology to cut-pass restrictions, filters, and censorship to deliver a video streaming service platform that is easy to use and advert free. — monvid white paper

Right from the get-go the promises of blockchain are being wrapped around video content delivery: freedom from filters, bypassing censorship.

The whitepaper goes on to claim the project will deliver a peer-to-peer video sharing experience, and a proxy video streaming service. The latter is presented as some sort of separate service in the case where a user can’t watch the video in the official Monvid app because of region-locking.

I need to pause here and very explicitly say that the white paper itself offers little to no concrete explanations for their concepts, methodologies, or technologies. The section “Competitors” doesn’t actually talk about competition, just feature bullet points like “encrypted data transfer.”

The Technology section of the white paper purports to explain the underlying technologies being utilized by monvid. Instead, it only offers vague handwaves to blockchain technology and creating a decentralized content delivery network.

Note: content delivery networks are already decentralized.

“Surely”, I thought, “this is just a poor or lacking translation of a foreign project.”

The creators are in Jacksonville, FL in the United States of America.

Alright then, perhaps there is a deeper technical explanation of what they’re doing in the various links on their website or their Telegram channel?

The Non-Starter Review

One of the first items I found was this “token review” on BitGuru: https://www.bitguru.co.uk/token-review/monvid-io-the-next-generation-decentralized-streaming-platform/

Monvid.io is based on the Ethereum blockchain, with the project looking to leverage the high-efficiency and capability of blockchain technology for streamed content to be equally available all through the world without any geographical restrictions, which are often imposed by current streaming giants.

Taken at face value the above paragraph kills the project.

If the platform were actually built on Ethereum and not just the token there is no possible way, none, for a video streaming service to function on the blockchain itself.

Block Update Time and Gas Limits

Ethereum’s block update time averages 15 seconds with a maximum throughput of 8,000,000 gas (at the time of writing).

Previous tests have shown a ratio of something like ~70 gas per byte being sent to a contract.

Digital Rebellion’s video size calculator puts one minute of MPEG-2 6.2Mbps (fixed rate) video at about 46.5mb.

Multiplying that out we’re talking about 3,255,000,000 gas or approximately 406 Ethereum blocks to transfer in one minute of movie-quality video.

That would take about 1.7 hours to transfer a minute of video.

A Custom Blockchain?

But what if the token review cited above was simply not specifying the technology correctly, and monvid is rolling their own blockchain and only using Ethereum for the tokens?

YouTube itself handles an absurd amount of traffic, in 2017 the estimate was around 93 petabytes a year.

To believe that a video streaming service could actually be blockchain-based would require us to also believe that this new blockchain, at 100x the size of the Ethereum blockchain, would only have as much content as 0.1% of YouTube’s content being added each year.

The storage sizes are mind-boggling and can’t simply be handwaved away with hoping that decentralizing it on the blockchain will somehow store such huge volumes on (mostly) consumer hardware.

Off-Chain?

Or, perhaps, the project is meant to be completely off-chain except for the tokens that act as measures of value.

In that case the raised sum of money is woefully inadequate to afford the storage and infrastructure necessary to host significant amounts of video in a distributed manner.

Perhaps it’s possible that the project will utilize distributed storage space using a custom app that communicates with a blockchain but isn’t a blockchain (a normal P2P service like BitTorrent?).

This leaves open so many questions I had to keep looking through their documentation, hoping, anywhere, for a clue on how the technology really works.

What Is The Technology Behind Monvid?

It turns out they wrote up a technical article on their Medium blog.

This chart kind of sums it up, doesn’t it? It’s a peer to peer network.

This is the most technical diagram I could find about “how the monvid technology works.”

Let’s walk through each major explanation they make (there are only three):

What is the different between the visitors who are also uploading the video ( outgoing arrows ) and the visitors who only are watching videos ( only incoming arrows )? Well, the difference is that those who are also practicing in the uploading event, they are earning rewards by sharing their traffic and the resources, because there is no single server to get the stream data from, so there is no single fee for the company like Youtube is paying for their servers, and therefore the people who are helping the community they will be rewarded.

To sum: visitors who stick around and let people download pieces of video from them will get rewards on the blockchain. It’s BitTorrent with a reward token attached.

The other question is what will happen if no one wants to help the community and all want to watch the videos only? Well, we are going to run a group of servers around the world which will join the community by free and will help the community even if there is no one who is uploading the contents at that time, so you as the visitor won’t be affected and can watch all of your videos everytime you want.

So the company promises to host their own servers that will obviate the need for the previous answer — a distributed viewer network. On the one hand they say they won’t have the costs to pay like YouTube, on the other hand they admit they’ll need to?

How can we prevent any abusive attacks on the contents and how can we make sure there is no censorship or filtering on the videos? This is time to get help from the Blockchain Network for solving such issues. Every single video and content which is going to be live on our platform is being encrypted and that information will be stored on the blockchains and those pieces of information will be checked before being streamed over the internet. If an attacker wants to change the files and upload them again to the community this will be rejected by the platform and that data won’t have permissions to be downloaded or uploaded again, so in this way, all contents are safe and secure.

There’s more handwavery magic happening here: how do you decide the initial video was legitimate? How do you decide the new video upload is attempting to replace the previous one?

Again, to this point, it’s unclear whether the videos are being stored initially in a blockchain environment or just their metadata. The reliance on visitor P2P distribution is clear, however.

Still, this document that purports to be a technical explanation of their technology has essentially no technical information: just broad explanations about how existing platforms like P2P, hashes, and blockchains will be utilized.

Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

I’ve given an incredible amount of leeway in this article because it is technically possible a value-added blockchain project for video to exist based on hashing signatures of the videos for authentication, or need a token for rewards.

But the severe lack of any real technical documentation, convincing demonstrations, or really any technical explanations at all has left me boggled at its fundraising success.

At last I found an interview with one of the core developers:

Q. So what is exactly the differences between monvid application and others?

A. It is all decentralized, no one can censor, filter and control the traffics between the community members. The packets are all encrypted and saved on the blockchain, so no one can change them.

Emphasis mine.

Mathematically and computationally this is not possible on a blockchain at scale (e.g. even a minute of high quality video), chiefly for the reasons cited for Ethereum previously.

Summary: Non-Viable

It can’t work. It’s a deadcoin walking.