The LEO token has seen some massive market movement recently, after the wLEO project was announced, where a swap token on Ethereum for LEO will allow people a different access to the LEO ecosystem other than Hive Engine. While this will become a new way to trade and earn LEO rewards, you can already make your LEO work for you. In this post I am sharing my current strategy how to make the best use of my LEO stake and earn passive curation rewards.
Earn/Buy and Stake your LEO
The first step to earn LEO curation rewards is by owning a stake in the ecosystem. It is the same process as with HIVE, the mother blockchain where LEO is running as a second level token on. You need to earn LEO first by creating content directly on LEOFinance.io or simply use the #LEO tag with any finance related article posted via Hive frontends like Peakd.com.
If you don't have a HIVE account yet, you can create yourself one with various tools offered from Hiveonboard in collaboration with Peakd. Here is my referral link, which brings you to the account creation service: https://peakd.com/register?ref=flauwy
Another way to get LEO is to simply buy it on the market. The best way to do that is by using the LEO Dex, a much better alternative to Hive Engine. Deposit and Withdrawal fees are here only 0.25%, which saves you 75% compared to Hive Engine.
After you earned or bought some LEO, you need to stake your LEO. Only then, you get LEO power and are able to give LEO upvotes to other content creators who use the #LEO tag or post on LeoFinance. Liquid LEO in your wallet will not give you any LEO power. The larger your stake in LEO, the higher your LEO upvotes and hence your own curation rewards.
Setting Up Auto-Votes
The best for the ecosystem are manual curators. You will be able to use your proof-of-brain and find the best content. Scout for good LEO content creators on /trending/ and /created/leofinance, for example.
However, this costs a lot of time every single day, to make the best use of your LEO power. Just like with HIVE, you regenerate 20% LEO voting power each day and you want to avoid hitting 100% of your voting power at all times or else having opportunity costs for not effectively using your stake.
LEO has its own tool to check your current voting power (amongst many other useful data like curation rewards), called HiveStats.
In order to avoid any idle time at 100% of your voting power, you can use an auto-upvote service for the authors of your trust. I am using Hive.vote for the auto-votes. After authorizing the app to vote with your account, you can create a fanbase of authors you want to automatically upvote when they create new content.
The options include the upvote weight, the time to wait before voting and the weekly and daily limits. Here are a few points to consider:
- Voting before others will increase your own curation rewards, hence the earlier, the better
- There are no time penalties in the first five minutes, as it is the case with HIVE
- If you have no or little HIVE staked on the account the time to wait before voting can be 0 (if you have about 500 HIVE or more staked choose 5 minutes to avoid loosing HIVE curation rewards - or seperate HIVE and LEO votes with the step below)
- If you do have about 500 or more HIVE staked but you only want to curate with LEO, you can set the upvote weight to 1% and put a multiplier on your LEO vote using the Leo DEX Rewards Vote Weight Multiplier (I have mine on the maximum 99% for LEO); the author will now get a maximum LEO upvote with only a 1% HIVE upvote, keeping your HIVE voting power free for others
- I have my Weekly limits set to 14 and Daily limits to 2, allowing the authors to post twice each day and still receive my upvotes, but you can adjust this to any number you prefer
Doing these steps above will make your LEO stake work for you at all times, for as long as your fanbase of authors keeps creating new content. You don't need to actively curate them yourself. LEO will start flowing into your wallet on a daily basis (after the first week as curation rewards are delayed by seven days). You probably want to adjust your auto-vote settings and add/remove authors from your list every now and then. You should also monitor your LEO voting power and add more authors to your fanbase, if you still are hitting 100% or lower your multiplier if your power drops too low.
