Odysee’s Parent Company Shut Down in 2023 — and the Site Just Kept Running (and Then Changed How It Pays Creators Twice)

Odysee, the decentralized video site I’d been treating as a quiet backup plan for YouTube, was built by a company that went out of business three years ago — and the site simply didn’t go with it. This post exists because of our earlier story on YouTube as a “bully monopoly”: after my own travel channel got wiped out over association with a separate, already-banned channel, I moved Social Travel News’s video embeds to Odysee and started looking at the alternatives. This is the second of three, after Rumble, and Odysee has the stranger origin story.

A video site built on a blockchain, and paid in its own coin

Logos are trademarks of their respective owners and are shown to identify the services; no endorsement is implied. Odysee logo: CC0.

Odysee launched in 2020 as a front end for the LBRY protocol. Videos would be distributed across a network of nodes instead of one company’s servers, and creators would be paid not in dollars but in a cryptocurrency called LBC (LBRY Credits). In effect, the “ad revenue” was a token the platform itself had minted.

The SEC came for the token, and the company didn’t survive it

• March 2021: the SEC sued LBRY Inc., arguing the sale of LBC — which had raised about $11 million — was an unregistered securities offering.
• November 2022: a federal judge agreed.
• May 2023: the SEC cut the penalty it sought from $22 million to $111,614, saying LBRY had “insufficient funds” and was “near to winding down the business.”
• October 20, 2023: LBRY Inc. announced it was shutting down for good, citing the court loss and “several million dollars in debts.”

Source: Blockworks and Baker McKenzie.

The app outlived its maker

In June 2024, Odysee was acquired by Forward Research, a company tied to the Arweave blockchain ecosystem, and the platform a dead company had built just kept running under new ownership. Source: The Block. With a decentralized protocol, the company can go to zero without taking the videos, channels, and audience with it.

Then it changed how it pays people. Twice.

• Original model: LBC, the platform’s own token — the coin the SEC fight was about. LBC tipping is being phased out, with a deprecation date of July 10, 2026.
• After the acquisition: Stripe. Credit-card tipping, paid memberships, and paid content through the same processor your local coffee shop uses.
• Mid-2026: Stripe retired entirely — no new Stripe accounts, and existing Stripe tipping, memberships, and paid content shut down.
• Replacement: a decentralized payment system on the Arweave blockchain, using the AR cryptocurrency through Wander Wallet, with USD stablecoins described as part of the plan going forward.

Odysee’s stated reasoning is that both Stripe (a card processor) and LBC (a single token) routed value through a middleman or checkpoint, and the new system is pitched as removing that. Source: Odysee’s announcement and Reclaim The Net’s coverage of both the Arweave payment rollout and the Stripe phase-out. Two pivots in under two years, steered by a company that didn’t exist when the site launched — a lot of “please re-set-up how you get paid” emails.

How big is it, really?

• Odysee: roughly 7 million monthly active users per Forward Research around the 2024 acquisition; about 10.6 million monthly visits per third-party analytics as of June 2026.
• Rumble (previous post): around 78 to 80 million.
• YouTube: in the neighborhood of 2.7 billion.

Odysee is a small town next to Rumble’s mid-size city and YouTube’s entire continent.

Who’s doing well there

I’d like to give you an Odysee top ten. I can’t, and neither can anyone else: Odysee publishes no public channel ranking, and the one rankings page I tried returned nothing. The best documented list of notable channels I found is a single Reclaim The Net article from April 2022, which is now more than four years old, and it comes with a catch big enough to need its own sentence: most of the numbers in it are YouTube subscriber counts, not Odysee audiences. The article gives no Odysee-specific follower figure for any of them. Source: Reclaim The Net, April 2022.

With that caveat stapled on, the channels it named:

So what that list really shows is which sizeable YouTube channels had set up on Odysee by spring 2022, not how any of them did once there.

• The mix is a podcast, gaming and movie channels, news and tech, with no one category dominating.
• Linux and tech channels are reported to have moved there in the same period, which I’ll pass along as reported.
• The same article cited SimilarWeb for 34.1 million visitors to Odysee in March 2022.
• No source I found says what kind of content performs best on Odysee today, and there is no Odysee-native ranking to check.

For a small creator that’s the plainest summary I can give: the examples are old, the numbers are borrowed from YouTube, and the platform doesn’t tell you who’s winning.

The moderation question, stated plainly

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project published a digital threat report describing “little to no content moderation” on Odysee and documenting channels banned from mainstream platforms for white nationalist and conspiracy content. Its data:

• 165 channels categorized as extremist, hosting more than 50,000 videos combined.
• Roughly $336,000 in donations to those channels through the tipping feature.
• Heavily concentrated: the three highest-earning channels took in about 40% of that total.

Source: SPLC Hatewatch. That’s one advocacy organization’s research and characterization, reported as such, not as settled fact. It’s the trade-off that runs through this series: the less a platform moderates, the less likely it is to erase your channel over a 7-second clip — and the more likely you are to share the neighborhood with people mainstream platforms kicked out for a reason.

Our own channel on Odysee

We run a channel on Odysee too, so this isn’t purely theoretical for us:

• Social Travel News on Odysee — more in our post about it.

Where that leaves me

I’m not pulling my embeds off Odysee. It works, and it has the one quality YouTube took from me: it didn’t delete my work. But I now know I’m leaning on a site whose builder went broke, whose owner is a blockchain company, and whose payment rails have been rebuilt twice since 2024 and are being rebuilt again. “Decentralized” means the site can survive almost anything. It doesn’t mean the ground stops moving.