We are paying LEN dividends to the HivePower delegators by buying LEN tokens from the market... Combine that with nice APR rewards inside the LEN-LENM pool, and we have sometimes a shortage of liquid tokens on the market... The second pool gives another dimension and arbitrage opportunities with LENM and LEN prices inside and outside the pools... and the price goes up organically...
Something similar (and even better) had (and has) to happen with the LEO price, but they were minting tokens to pay HP delegators and then the price went down... They said that they will stop doing that, but not sure if it is still "valid"... The price should go up, but they have bags full of LEO at the moment... That could be the reason why it's not going up...
They no longer print LEO for leo.bounties from where delegators were paid, so yeah, they buy it from the market.
But it's a more complex market, with more participants and interests, I guess, with their bridges into BSC and Polygon.
The inflation though dropped from something like 25k LEO per day to 5-6k LEO per day, if I remember correctly.