We've all been there. Burned by bold promises and hype that turns into ash the second you touch it.
It's not a new story. It happens all the time. A new AAA game will be released and users will find out all the hype was vapour, as the game turns out to be a buggy mess. A new coin will be promoted, folks will buy in, and lose everything to a rug pull. A Kickstarter will promise a game/tool/gadget that would be perfect and three years later you give up on even hoping to get anything at all.
It's a song and dance that we all have experienced in one way or another.
Often, it's marked by a ton of bold promises by extremely passionate people that simply cannot be delivered.
We've seen it here, on chain, multiple times. We don't even have to look that far back to see flops that burned us - just look at PsyberX and that utter flop.
If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Buckle up, because this is probably going to be a long one. We're going to talk about InLeo; what they've designed already, what they promise, and why we should be critical of hype.
Now, before I get into this too far you should know a few things about me that will help you understand why I'm about to be pretty critical. I've done graphic design/UX (I sucked at it, because I hate working with customers, but experience is experience). I spent 8 years as a QA testing websites and apps. I am currently a professional developer on a mature project. While some of what I say is based on personal feelings, a lot of what I'm about to talk about is based on earned experience in a field I am actively employed in (or have previously worked in).
I'm not going to claim that this is going to be comprehensive, by any means. But, before we get to current promises, it's worth looking at what has come before.
First, let's just get the two obvious dumpster fires out of the way. Cub Finance and PolyCub were, without a doubt, unmitigated disasters. They were utter flops, and it takes zero amount of time and effort to see folks in the community who were burned by this hype.
Remember LeoMobile? No? Well, it was a project that had some hype and now how's it doing? It doesn't exist. I honestly didn't follow this one too closely so I don't know if it was just abandoned or if they ran into issues, but either way, the end is the same.
This feels like an abandoned project, which is odd because of all the stuff that the team has made it has far and away the most revenue-generation potential. If only folks used it, but they don't. Stats (which are likely inaccurate since we're not getting them from Leo itself) suggest that comparatively few are.
Vs TribalDex:
I will note that as I was researching this for this post, Khal has very recently talked about exactly this point, and suggested that the team will be working on updates to LeoDex.
It is worth mentioning that, obviously, comparing TribalDex to LeoDex isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. TD gets its traffic from token swaps dedicated to our L2 assets. LeoDex is focused on external capture. These services do two different things, but the point is to provide a frame of reference on user numbers, because for the team to be able to fund anything off of the profits of the Dex, those numbers have got to go way up.
Which begs the question of... how? How does the team achieve that given the recent funding situation? I'm interested to see what future development happens, as I'm not sure how they'll pull in enough usage without additional chains signing on, and since that proposal is current DOA... well, I don't envy the choices that'll have to be made.
The "Twitter killer". Only, it's not, is it? This is saying something given that ol' Musky is doing his very best to kill that app all by himself, having lost both substantial revenue and users. But, that aside, InLeo to its credit is (currently) mostly functional, and is probably the best microblog we have on Hive. Credit where credit is due.
Having said that, it's also fair to have criticisms because the rollout of InLeo was not smooth. It took quite a while to just have Threads reliably surfaced every time you went to the website. This is a bare minimum requirement for a functional product, and it took several months to stop throwing 404s or timeouts just loading the home page.
Now though, it is pretty solid. It's been a long while since I couldn't load the site and they've squashed a huge number of bugs and done some decent UI cleanup. They still have "don't post links as top-level posts", which I've ranted about before and it is something that irks me because it implies that they don't understand why Web2 did this and simply ported the functionality over because "it's what twitter does", without understanding the mechanical reasons it was in play on Twitter in the first place.
As I said at great length and plainly in the linked post: this is bad UX and it serves no purpose, it should not exist.
Now, finally, there's the whole "monthly users" thing. I'm not going to rehash that because folks are arguing it back and forth constantly. I will say though, that it's a bad look when your dashboard numbers don't line up with the marketing materials you're publishing.
We see MACr (monthly active creators) value for Dec 2024 to be 4,855 in the media graphic published in January 2025. But if you look at the live, public data that they publish on InLeo Stats, we get 3,198 MACr with no value for MACo (Monthly active consumers):
That's a discrepancy in their own data of 1,657 "Creator" branded users. Now I wouldn't care about this at all really except for the INFURIATING fact that they keep tying Proposal funding to promises to hit targets OR RETURN THE FUNDING. This year's Original Proposal as well as the prior year's 10k MAU's proposal both featured this caveat, and anyone with half a brain should see that as a red flag. They dropped such phrasing in the Revised (current) proposal, thank the gods... but I can't believe I have to say this:
Folks can, and will, argue the stats on users because when you do this as a company you have invited them to challenge you. YOU opened a door, were shocked anyone used it, and it has caused dozens of posts worth of drama because of it. Further complicating this, the link for the raw data that was provided as a means to fact-check Leo no longer works.
This is likely because they chose to host it via discord of all goddamn places. The original link:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/985615672883150948/1338236142394544168/rawdata5.zip?ex=67aa5907&is=67a90787&hm=cbcd1eb4a9afbf6c0e23d5e9cb5a6bc7117054243ad99e6a34fd33a8c76f1dd8&
In the nicest possible way I can say it, this is amateur. All of the last two paragraphs are utterly amateur mistakes. YOU RUN A WEBSITE WITH THE CAPACITY TO STORE WHATEVER YOU WANT.
WHY ARE YOU STORING DATA ON DISCORD?!
Why are you inviting problems by promising to return funds that you've likely already spent if you don't hit metrics (metrics that only you can supply). You know who does this? Startups looking for funding at any cost. It's a tactic designed to provide a level of assurance to folks who don't know it for the red flag it is. It's bad business, and it's not something any reasonable company would ever do.
Now, I'm sure that's a lesson the Leo team has hopefully learned and won't repeat, but all of these ham-fisted historical issues lead me to the next point.
An Everything App! (Because those have traditionally been super successful and easy to build, right?)
From the linked post, I'm going to skip over all the 'stuff we did' and bring your attention to the 2025 roadmap:
Coming in 2025
Well, that's a hell of a roadmap to achieve in the next 10 months. How many of you have worked on dev teams before? How many of you have done sprint planning/roadmap planning? How many of you can look at this list and spot the points that a team could reasonably spend an entire quarter working on just to get right?
How many developers does the Leo team pay, exactly? Because this roadmap is a... let's call it very liberal assumption of how little time these will take to get right.
A responsible company could look at just one of these items, such as the LeoMerchants features, and reasonably expect to spend at least a month or two on just that item. Add in that you're working with a third party and it gets even more complicated. Are there any considerations for local compliance? Are there any considerations for auditing those transactions and making that data available for the end merchant?
Unless some of this is already well on the way to deliverable (and it looks like some of it is), it's a huge list of features. With some of it already effectively out the door, maybe this is achievable.
To wrap this all up, I'm very critical of some of the things the Leo team has done. I side-eye some of the hyped-up goals that they've yet to accomplish. I think they are a passionate group of people who believe strongly in what they're building. But they've also made missteps. Inviting a storm over the definition of Monthly Users being just the most recent example. Let's not forget the veiled suggestion that other chains pay their devs way more and it'd be a shame if Leo had to go there. There was a half-thought-out Thread about being a power user or selling your stake and leaving Leo.
They have built some great tools - HiveStats is possibly the best statistical tool ever, and I don't know what I'd do without it. LeoDex is dripping with potential. InLeo isn't perfect but it does function now even if there were growing pains, and it's a solid little microblogging site.
There have been projects that did not pan out, and that's to be expected, but what I am most critical of is that the team seems to constantly be trying to do everything all at once. Rapid expansion is a trap that will snap shut on you.
The path to success is paved with failure, so I won't tell you that Leo can't succeed. They could. But it is reasonable to be critical of anyone who promises you the moon. It is reasonable to hold to task the people who are asking you for a ton of funding. And don't think that because it's the DHF that it isn't YOU being asked, it is. The DHF isn't magic free money, and folks have indisputably been treating it as such.
When people stand to personally profit off of you, you should be critical of what they promise. You should remember their history, and you should weigh past performance against current and future promises.
People are not coins, and by and large they don't meaningfully change their personalities, which means past performance IS indicative of future performance.
Don't blindly follow hype.