What Bonding LPT Means

What delegators are actually doing when they bond LPT: non-custodial stake attribution, dilution protection, rewards, governance weight, and unbonding.

Bonding LPT means attributing your stake to one orchestrator so that your capital helps secure the protocol, earns a share of round rewards, and carries voting weight in Livepeer governance. It does not mean lending tokens to an operator or transferring ownership of the tokens to them.

Delegation is stake attribution, not custody transfer

When you bond:

• your LPT is held by the BondingManager contract on Arbitrum One
• the orchestrator cannot move or spend your tokens
• your wallet remains the party that can unbond, withdraw, or redelegate
• your bonded balance carries governance weight

What changes is the stake attribution. Your balance now counts toward a specific orchestrator’s total bonded stake.

Why unbonded LPT gets diluted

Livepeer issues new LPT each round to bonded stake. If you stay unbonded, you do not receive any of that issuance while active delegators do.

That means “doing nothing” is not a neutral position. Your share of total supply shrinks relative to bonded holders until you either bond or exit the asset.

As of 6 April 2026, the treasury reward cut remains 10% on-chain. Delegators and orchestrators share the other 90% of round issuance.

What you earn when bonded

Bonded delegators can earn:

• inflationary LPT, subject to round issuance and the orchestrator’s rewardCut
• ETH fees, subject to the orchestrator’s workload and feeShare
• governance voting power derived from bonded stake

Those outcomes are not guaranteed by bonding alone. They also depend on whether the orchestrator remains active and keeps calling reward() reliably.

What bonding commits you to

Commitment	What it means
One orchestrator per wallet	A single bonded position points to one orchestrator at a time
Arbitrum One only	Delegation happens on Arbitrum One, not Ethereum mainnet
Exit delay	Full withdrawal requires unbonding and waiting through the protocol unbonding period
Ongoing monitoring	You should periodically check reward reliability and commission changes

Switching is different from exiting

There are two distinct ways to change your position:

• Redelegate: move your bonded stake attribution to another orchestrator without going through the unbonding wait
• Unbond and withdraw: stop participating and wait for the unbonding period before tokens can return to your wallet

If your issue is the operator, redelegation is usually the correct action. If your issue is that you want liquid tokens back, unbonding is the correct action.

What risk you are actually taking

For current Livepeer mainnet conditions, the main delegator risks are:

• choosing an orchestrator that misses reward calls
• choosing an operator that later changes commission terms unfavourably
• needing liquidity before the unbonding period has passed
• contributing to stake concentration if you always choose already-dominant operators

The main risk is not orchestrator custody. The tokens are in the protocol contract, not their wallet.

Related pages

Choose an Orchestrator

Use this once the bonding model is clear and you are ready to compare operators.

Delegation Economics

See how reward cut, fee share, and treasury allocation affect outcomes.

Manage Your Delegation

Claim, compound, redelegate, or exit after you are already bonded.

Protocol Parameters

Check the live unbonding period and other governance-controlled values.