Every end is a new beginning.
The LEO community has voted to allow both CUB and POLYCUB holders to liquidate their assets at a fixed rate into LEO. This signals an overwhelming consensus to put these arguably failed protocols to pasture and focus on bigger and better things: naming consolidating all value back into the LEO brand and token.
Personally I have a lot of mixed feelings about this because I think DEFI has a real shot at sustainability if done correctly. I won't rehash any of my previous posts on this issue, but rest assured I have many opinions.
(The biggest one being only allocating yield to pairs that include the token being diluted)
Luckily both Thorchain and Maya seem to have gotten the memo.
That being said...
It matters very little at this point because it is quite clear that a platform like LEO already has too much on its plate. We bit off more than we could chew during the last bull market, that much is obvious. There's simply no time to be messing about with DEFI on BSC and Polygon when we can go directly to the source and get a layer 1 DEX listing on Maya's wLEO/CACAO. This is a madly bullish listing and it will be happening in a matter of days (March 20th?). Soon soon soon sooner soonest.
The vote to allow an escape from CUBs to LEO was pretty much unanimous. I voted yes and pretty much all the other big stakeholders did as well. There may only be 93 votes cast but there's no way this decision is getting overturned. It's happening, and that's great. Onward and upward.
The estimate is that something like a million LEO could be printed if everyone chooses to make the transition. I'm told that it isn't required to convert the tokens and that the platforms will be around a while longer, but why stick around on a dead chain when LEO is about to make some serious moves? Already the token price is up over x2 from the floor of 5 cents in anticipation of this listing. Nobody cares that a million LEO might get printed, and for good reason. It's pretty irrelevant given the overwhelming bullishness of the Maya listing.
wLEO/CACAO
If I'm being honest I'm shocked that these guys are even willing to list wLEO. That's pretty insane for an up-and-coming dex that only has 9 listings so far. And look at the yields on the LPs... they are terrible. If wLEO can get some liquidity in there and some yield we'll stand out quite a bit from the other options.
I'm told the pool is going to be seeded with around $100k. So something like $50k CACAO and $50k wLEO. Because of how expensive it is to use ETH anyone that wants to interact with this pool is going to have to pay a pretty penny. I'm thinking about depositing $5k for the culture. But also I might wait for LEO to go up in value first because it almost certainly will. The amount of tokens a pool like this could gobble up is very significant.
So I should buy LEO? Number go up?
I did not say that, but I would say that if you already have LEO now would be the absolute worst time to sell it, to put it mildly. LEO has plenty of problems that I could be pointing out right now, but this is a bullish post so I will refrain from such party pooping. Maybe next time.
How does Hive benefit?
Well we're definitely going to need to increase the depth of liquidity between LEO and Hive (yield on Diesel pools maybe?) but this connection will allow Hive users to have a more direct path to permisionless L1 DEXes like Thorchain and Maya. Or maybe it won't technically be more direct than a centralized exchange but it will be permissionless which is always nice.
The same type of bridge scenario should play out where users can trade Hive into any L1 asset on these DEXes using LEO as a middle-man. The reverse is also true. Hopefully the LEO listing generates some attention from the Maya community that extends all the way into Hive itself.
The big difference here is that there won't be any centralized wrapped assets like we would see on EVM chains. That eliminates a lot of the underlying counterparty risk. It also allows us to do things like trade Hive and HiveEngine tokens directly into on-chain Bitcoin rather than something like bBTC which is arguably wrapped garbage that inherits far to many centralized risks. However it still remains unclear if all these fees will end up being actually worth it in the end.
ETH is very expensive
Yes, and that sucks... but there's also a silver lining here in that users on ETH are also pretty wealthy on aggregate, and if they commit to acquiring some wLEO they're gonna buy at least a couple thousand dollars at once if only because the fee might be something like $80. I hope ETH fees go down but no promises.
Because LEO actually has a product behind it and even ways to generate revenue (ads, upvotes, curation, blah blah blah) I think it's going to really stand out when compared to the small list of tokens that Maya has to offer. They might be a small community but the platform itself does seem to have a lot of promise.
Last I checked they had a market cap around Hive putting them somewhere around rank #400 or some such position. In fact sites like Coingecko don't even rank them yet because they have zero centralized exchange listings. After all why focus on exchange listings when you are the exchange? Lots of room for growth for everyone involved. Bull market vibes for sure.
Conclusion
I'm truly shocked that this listing is happening. I'm even more shocked that it's happening so quickly. Given my experience with Thorchain and the fact that Maya works in almost exactly the same way (fork of Thorchain) I'm feeling very optimistic about this entire situation. Not only for LEO but for Hive as well.
Make no mistake that the centralized pain points of LEO are arguably quite numerous and the risk is high. Being a liquidity provider on a DEX like Maya also comes with its own set of risks, so I would urge everyone to trend lightly on this and not allow FOMO to make any decisions on one's behalf.
All that being said the streamlining on LEO continues. The UI is getting cleaner and more user friendly. The bugs are being worked out. It looks like LEO is even storing JPEGS on their own servers now instead of imgur. Interoperability is key for open networks. Onward and upward.