Theta Fuel

Theta Fuel (TFUEL) is an ERC-20 utility token powering Theta Network, a blockchain-based decentralized video streaming and delivery service developed by Theta Labs. TFUEL is one of the two tokens native to this network, the other being THETA, although the majority of operations (except for governance) require TFUEL and not THETA. The first implementation of Theta mainnet was launched in 2019 by Theta Labs. Since then, there’s been one major upgrade, with another one (the mainnet 3.0 launch) slated for June 2021.

Theta Network’s purpose is to solve some problems which plague streaming services and content delivery networks (CDNs), such as quality losses and high delivery costs. Theta’s algorithm incentivizes participating nodes to share their unused bandwidth and computing resources, creating a decentralized platform. 

There are three types of nodes in the network: 

• Edge nodes share their bandwidth, participate in some tasks and get rewarded with TFUEL;
• Enterprise validators – large nodes used for the initial block verification;
• Guardians (went live with the mainnet 2.0 update) – nodes that stake their THETA to confirm the blocks previously checked by validators and claim TFUEL rewards.

This two-layer validation system is one of the most prominent features of Theta Network since it’s such a clever technology. New functionality is being constantly added through updates, such as the possibility of 1-click delegated staking, TFUEL tokens burning as a transaction “tax”, NFT support, etc.