A little-known blockchain-based livestreaming service has received a massive boost, signing YouTube star PewDiePie in an exclusive streaming partnership.

The company, DLive Inc., comes from the same people behind Lino, which raised $20 million in February 2018 and not surprisingly operates on Lino’s own custom blockchain.

Pitched as empowering “creators and viewers through a revolutionary rewards system,” the service rewards both using its native tokens called Lino points. Unlike Twitch or YouTube, DLive does not take a cut of payments made to creators, instead making money through the creation, and inflation, of its own cryptocurrency.

“DLive is a place where instead of competing against each other, it benefits creators to support one another,” Wilson Wei, co-founder of Lino Network said in a statement. “With no platform cuts, we incentivize everyone to create the highest quality content for viewers.”

In signing Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, the world’s most popular YouTube star by subscriber numbers, the service has brought itself a lot of attention.

With nearly 94 million subscribers, an average PewDiePie video gets about 7 million views while his last two livestreams attracted 4.5 million and 13 million views.

If only a small percentage of that audience follows PewDiePie to DLive, it’s a boost of possibly millions of new users, many of whom might stick around to watch other content or possibly even start streaming themselves.

To put that in perspective, as of 10:30 p.m. EDT, the most popular live stream on DLive had an audience of only 457 people.

The idea of using a blockchain-based platform to reward creators is not a new one. Steemit, a social networking site, also went down that path, but it laid off 70 percent of its staff in October because of the declining value of cryptocurrency. DLive actually started on the Steem blockchain used by Steemit.

Photo: PewDiePie