LEO Token (LEO)

The in-house currency of the Bitfinex exchange and its affiliated services, issued in 2019 by the iFinex group after a private placement. Technically it is an ordinary Ethereum contract: there is no chain of its own behind it, no validators and no fees for its operation.

Its value rests on exchange policy. Holding LEO earns discounts on trading, withdrawal and borrowing fees, with the size of the discount scaling to the balance held rather than to turnover. The second support is the buyback: the issuer committed to spending part of the group's revenue acquiring the token on the market and destroying it, so supply shrinks irreversibly and the pace of that shrinkage depends on how much the company earns.

The token grants no governance rights and is not a stake in the company: it is a utility instrument of one trading venue, useful precisely within its perimeter. The scale of the buyback is not an obligation owed to holders: it is company policy, declared and carried out by the company itself.

The token was created as a way to close a hole in the group's balance sheet, and its economics have been tied to one company's revenue from the outset.