Today the price of UNUS SED LEO (LEO) token jumped 43% to reach its record high.
At the time of writing it was trading at $7.13.
It has hit a daily high of $8.04 and a daily low of $4.96 and has a trading volume of $56,936,717, a market cap of $6,803,494,168, and a circulating supply of 953,954,130 LEO coins.
Let’s now take a deep dive and see what the hype is all about.
What is UNUS SED LEO?
Before delving into the current uptrend of LEO token, it's important we first understand what it is and how it works.
In a nutshell, UNUS SED LEO is a utility token used across the iFinex ecosystem. The name comes from a Latin citation in one of Aesop’s fables. It allows Bitfinex users to save money on trading fees and the extent of the discount depends on how much LEO a Bitfinex trader has in their account.
UNUS SED LEO was launched in May 2019.
Why is the UNUS SED LEO price rallying?
Yesterday the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had seized over $3.6 billion, as per the current exchange rates, worth BTC that was stolen.
Bitfinex had lost $70 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) in the hack in 2016, it promised that it recovers the lost funds, it will use 80% of it to buy back and burn LEO. The officials noted that the process will take 18 months for compensation and the court process will commence seeing the victims reclaim their stolen funds.
The officials, however, did not disclose how long the process will take although from the previous trends it is evident that the process can take years like in the case of Gox’s $460 million hacks in 2013 and the victims are still waiting for their refunds.
Yesterday, LEO bulls overlooked all the red flags and continued to raise their bids for the token hoping that the upcoming supply crunch will make the token more valuable. All this time LEO price rose to its all-time high of $8.144, however, this dropped as low as $7.04 early today.
LEO had a mixed outlook though, as Adam Cochran, Partner at activist venture capital firm Cinneamhain Ventures, identified the ongoing challenges in the LEO price rally since not all the funds recovered funds will go through Bitfinex unless they belong to the exchange.
In a tweet yesterday he said:
"There could, of course, be some weird deal structure in place, with the custom tokens Bitfinex issued, where they essentially claim they bought the loss off of other customers and so the Bitcoin is theirs and they can claim it all, and then later distribute." he added that ‘’I won't be purchasing LEO while expecting a quick buyback from Bitfinex.’’
5/6
I would love to be wrong on this one but LEO was more a play for if funds returned via non-gov involvement.
Either way a big win for both Bitfinex and everyone who lost out as there is going to be a path to recovery at somepoint, in someway.
— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) February 8, 2022
However, Co-founder of crypto wallet service (MinePlex), Alexander Mamasidikov, termed the recovery of Bitfinex funds as a ‘’right fundamental" that will back LEO's future growth.
Alexander said:
"Native to Bitfinex, LEO has the chance of tagging along with the future ecosystem growth of the trading platform, a move that is billed to guarantee the coin’s continuous uptrend…. LEO is arguably underpriced when compared to the native tokens of its major competitors. In the mid-term, LEO is poised to touch the $10 resistance point while a quarterly close of $12 is likely should this current growth pace be sustained."