It's now almost 2 months after staking went live
How is the Dex doing? I guess the TL;DR is "not bad, not great". There was around 1M sLEO staked when the Dex first went live with staking rewards. There was a peak around 2 weeks ago with almost 7M sLEO staked. Since then the amount has decreased a bit to around 5.5M. This is around 18% of the LEO supply. I think there are a couple of reasons for this number being relatively low.
- people may actually not know about it
- they rather want to keep it on Hive (i.e. InLeo) and use it for curation rewards
- there is a big disincentive for bridging LEO (e.g. from Hive to ARB) since there is a massive 11-13% bridging fee
While the 7M sLEO came from 83 stakers, the 5.5M sLEO now comes from only 48 stakers. That's a decrease of around 45%! It seems that sLEO is heavily centralized, but then again, it doesn't really make sense to stake anything less than 5-10k LEO which includes a lot of holders.
Price for LEO has held up "okayish" in these turbulent times. While there was a brief spike to over 20 cents, it settled to around 9 cents now - which is still on par with Hive. It definitely seems like the new tokenomics with LEO 2.0 has helped stabilize and even add buying pressure to the token. While the HIVE/LEO ratio shows relative strength, the development in $ terms shows that it essentially has sold off just as much as all other alts.
Volume has been quite volatile as well. I believe there were some days with over $1M trading volume (!) From what I have seen, however, it generally ranges between $20k and $50k per day. Today, for example, it is quite low with well under $10k (although that will change throughout the day). Not sure about the general trend as I don't have the data, but I would guess it is relatively stable.
The fees generated by the swaps isn't really high as I have pointed out before. Stakers can expect only around 1-3% in returns which is extremely low for a Dex. In fact, it is not much of an incentive to stake LEO atm and depending on which route one uses for bridging, it can even lead to a net loss. This should even out once the Dex gets more volume, so it remains to be seen.
Conclusion
Again, "not bad, not great" seems to be the verdict here. I suppose the most positive sides are that volume is higher than I expected and that LEO has maintained strength compared to HIVE. The downsides are that there are now 45% less stakers than some weeks ago which shows that stakers aren't too satisfied with the main reason probably being the low APY. I should also mention that there are still many (!) bugs on the front end which I would have thought would have been ironed out by now, e.g., the dashboard is showing wrong or missing numbers, connecting a wallet is very buggy etc. But overall, the team has still delivered a useful Dapp.
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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