Theta Fuel, and in extension, the entire Theta Ecosystem, was co-founded by Mitch Liu and Jieyi Long in 2017. Liu has a long history in the gaming, video and virtual reality industries, co-founding video advertising firm Tapjoy, mobile social gaming startup Gameview Studios, and THETA.tv, the live streaming platform whose DApp was the first to be built on the Theta protocol.

Jieyi Long is Theta’s second co-founder and CTO, following similar multi-year experience in design automation, gaming, VR, and large scale distributed systems. He authored multiple peer-reviewed academic papers and holds various patents in video streaming, blockchain and virtual reality.

Theta now has a modest team, and its official website lists strategic corporate investors as Samsung NEXT, Sony Innovation Fund, media investors BDMI Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, CAA Creative Artists Agency, and traditional Silicon Valley VCs including DCM, Sierra Ventures and the VR Fund.

Theta’s main use case is decentralizing video streaming, data delivery and edge computing, making it more efficient, cost-effective and fair for industry participants. The network runs on a native blockchain, with two native tokens, known as Theta (THETA) and Theta Fuel (TFUEL), powering the internal economy.

Theta’s appeal is threefold: viewers get rewarded with better quality streaming service, content creators improve their earnings and middlemen — video platforms — save money on building infrastructure and increase advertising, subscription revenues. Users have an incentive to both watch network content and share network resources, as rewards come in the form of TFUEL tokens.

The platform is open source, and token holders receive governance powers as with many proof-of-stake (PoS)-based blockchain ecosystems. In addition to video, data and computing, Theta caters to developers looking to launch decentralized applications (DApps) such as DeFi and NFTs on its fully featured EVM-compatible smart contract platform.

As earlier mentioned, there are two coins in the Theta ecosystem; THETA and TFUEL. Both coins are used as the main tools for interaction on the Theta blockchain, yet serve different functions.

There are currently 5,232,675,200 TFUEL coins in circulation, which grows each year as new TFUEL is generated for staking rewards. Theta Tokens are fixed and at their max supply, which means there are 1,000,000,000 coins in circulation which will never increase.

Theta runs on the proof-of-stake algorithm, which means staking is possible. Since the amount of THETA in circulation is the max supply there will ever be, TFUEL is the reward for staking on the network. To qualify for staking, you have to stake at least 1,000 THETA to a Guardian Node or run your own Guardian Node.

The Theta Blockchain relies on a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. It, however, adds a multi-level Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism on its blockchain to achieve better security along with higher transaction throughput.

At the time of Theta Mainnet launch in March 2019, Theta introduced Guardian Nodes. With the Guardian Node, no single entity controls the majority of THETA tokens being staked at any one time. This further helps the network achieve a high transaction throughput of 1000+ TPS.

Theta uses a financial incentive scheme to ensure user participation in governance activities, and hence its network is secured by its own users.