Theta Network (THETA)

Theta Network (THETA) is the governance and staking cryptocurrency of the Theta blockchain, a network built to share video streams and, more recently, computing power between users' devices. THETA is staked by the nodes that secure the network, while a second token, Theta Fuel (TFUEL), pays for transactions and rewards people who relay video or rent out spare processing power.

The network is developed by Theta Labs, a company based in San Jose, California, led by Mitch Liu, who co-founded it with Jieyi Long. THETA has a fixed supply and is separate from TFUEL, which is issued and burned on an ongoing basis. Theta is often grouped with other projects that sell computing or storage over a blockchain, such as Filecoin (FIL) and Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET).

Picture a busy neighbourhood where everyone wants to watch the same football match. Instead of each house pulling the stream from a distant broadcaster, houses that already have it pass it on to their neighbours, and they get a small payment each time. The broadcaster saves money, viewers get a smoother picture, and spare capacity in people's homes is put to work.

Theta tries to do this for online video, and now also for the powerful graphics chips used in artificial intelligence. It uses two tokens. THETA is like a share in running the neighbourhood: big holders lock it up to keep the record of payments honest. TFUEL is the small change that moves around every time someone passes on a stream or rents out their computer.

Theta Labs began as part of SLIVER.tv, an esports streaming service, and raised about $20 million in a private token sale in late 2017, when THETA was first issued as an ERC-20 token. The Theta mainnet launched in March 2019, and THETA holders received TFUEL in a one-time airdrop. Guardian nodes, run by the community, were added in 2020, and Mainnet 3.0 in mid-2021 introduced TFUEL staking and burning. Theta has listed large companies, including Google, Samsung, Sony and Binance, among the operators of its enterprise validator nodes.

Theta also issued NFTs for media and entertainment partners through its ThetaDrop marketplace. In 2024 Theta Labs launched EdgeCloud, a service that rents out graphics processing power from its own servers and community edge nodes for artificial intelligence and video tasks. In December 2025 two former Theta Labs executives filed lawsuits in Los Angeles accusing Liu of inflating THETA's price through misleading partnership claims and of retaliating against them; the claims are allegations and had not been tested in court at the time of reporting.

Theta uses a form of proof of stake with two tiers. A small committee of enterprise validators proposes and signs blocks using Byzantine fault tolerance, and a much larger group of guardian nodes, which also stake THETA, checks their work and finalises blocks. Separately, edge nodes run by ordinary users relay video and handle computing jobs on a peer-to-peer basis and are paid in TFUEL; edge nodes that stake TFUEL become "elite" nodes and earn more. Holders who do not run a node can still take part in staking by delegating THETA to a guardian node. The chain supports smart contracts compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and its Metachain design lets projects run their own subchains.

THETA's supply is fixed at 1 billion tokens, and no new THETA is created. TFUEL started with about 5 billion tokens at mainnet launch and grows as staking rewards are paid, while the network burns all TFUEL paid as gas fees and at least a quarter of each payment to elite edge nodes. The change in TFUEL supply over a period is:

• $\Delta S$ is the change in TFUEL supply.
• $I$ is the TFUEL newly issued as rewards.
• $B$ is the TFUEL burned from fees and edge payments.

If a year saw 300 million TFUEL issued and 50 million burned, supply would rise by $300 - 50 = 250$ million. The supply would fall only if burns exceeded issuance, which depends on how much the network is used.

Critics say most of Theta's video traffic and partnerships have been small relative to the token's peak valuation in 2021, and the 2025 lawsuits sharpened questions about how partnerships were presented. Block production depends on a small, company-selected validator committee, which is more centralised than many networks. The two-token design can confuse buyers, and both tokens are volatile. EdgeCloud competes with large cloud providers and other decentralised computing projects, and it is not yet clear how much paying demand it attracts compared with rewards funded by new TFUEL. Most THETA and TFUEL trading takes place on exchanges rather than in payments for real services, so prices reflect speculation more than usage.

• Theta Network
• Theta documentation