LeoDex Troubles?

4 months after LeoDex staking rewards

Almost 4 months into LEO 2.0 and LeoDex paying out USDC to sLEO stakers, it's time for an update. There was quite some hype back then and even I was excited by the value proposition. The Leo 2.0 tokenomics seemed like a good overhaul (becoming deflationary) and a Dex generating revenue for stakers together with buybacks seemed like a solid idea.

Back in October the dashboard looked like this:

Around 6M Leo staked, a LEO price of around 14 cents and 74 stakers. The Dex also saw volumes of up to hundreds of thousands of $ a day (!) with even some outliers in the millions. I remember how active Khal was on X and the Dex got a lot of recogintion from THOR.

Then in November we saw a reduction in every metric: less than 6M staked, a LEO price of around 9 cents and only 48 stakers. Volume had also declined, but it was still in the tens of thousands.

But now the metrics are worse, still. While the amount of LEO has gone back up to around 6M, price is down to 6-7 cents and most tellingly there are only 24 stakers with essentially 0 volume! I guess there are essentially only a couple of whales left with LeoStrategy being a major one for sure. They have bought a lot of LEO from the market, but it has not done very little for price (I guess it could be down more...).

It's clear to me that users have not been convinced by the Dex. There is hardly any revenue coming in now since there is no volume. But worse still, the rewards have never really been great. Some months ago I calculated the APY at around 2%... hardly enough to convince anyone to stake there.

Another main problem that hasn't seen much recognition is the very high bridging fees from hLEO => LEO. Some months ago it was over 10% and I remember Khal saying that users should simply swallow the pill and move on... Sorry, but that felt more like trying to rip off users and the high fees were never openly shown on the bridge. Anyone who made that move could be stuck for years trying to break even!

This together with the drop in HIVE support was enough for me to not use the Dex. Although it's a shame really since so much work has been put into it.

Charts

LEO (here BLEO) has fluctuated quite a bit recently. While price going down to around 7 cents from 22 isn't great, most of the crypto market hasn't seen any green. Also, the recovery from under 2 cents seems to have been a more sustained one. It could easily fall back down lower, but overall it does seem like price could stabilize in this area which would be a success for the token, considering that it has only seen a downtrend since 2022.

Not surprisingly, LEO against HIVE is also trading lower. Back in July we saw the steep increase from around 0.06. LEO has managed to retain its value in the 0.5-0.6 range for the last weeks and the fact that it's not back down at 0.1 or lower speaks for itself. We can definitely see value retention from the improved tokenomics as well as the utility from the Dex.

Conclusion

I am really split when it comes to LEO and the team. While they have shown to ship many projects extremely fast, they often feel rushed with many bugs that don't get fixed (examples can be found on the Dex itself). I feel the team is constantly trying to develop new things (which is good of course), but isn't great at maintaining the things they made. That said, I do wish them success in the future, but I think I won't be part of it anymore.

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As a general reminder: Please keep in mind that none of this is official investment advice! Crypto trading entails a great deal of risk; never spend money that you can't afford to lose!

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