Today marks my first ever major $LEO Power Up Day.
Incentivized by the Zealy campaign and the promise of sexy, limited edition NFTs, I went ahead and did the full 8,000 LEO powerup across several transactions.
 

What is LPUD?

LEO Power Up Day is similar to HIVE Power Up Day. It happens every month and users are encouraged to stake (power up) their LEO tokens. The more you have staked, the more influence you have in the Leo Finance community. Your votes on Leo content on Hive generate more rewards, and there are all kinds of current and future planned perks for those who have LEO Power (read this for a taste).
 

My Power Up process

Getting a hold of 8K LEO wasn’t all that easy. It was worth about $300–$400 USD during the time I was trying to acquire it. LPUD anticipation created lots of buy pressure too.

I moved some liquidity pool assets around and on-ramped a little cash via LTC to get the SWAP.HIVE I needed. I managed to snag some LEO straight from the exchange market with high bids. Bots and other buyers were happy to outbid me in many circumstances, so I didn’t get all of the 8K this way.

The SWAP.HIVE:LEO liquidity pool was my main path. Sometimes it was trading near the Sell side of the spread, sometimes closer to the Buy. I kept my eye on it and traded when I felt it was low enough. Oh, and I had some spare BEE, turns out there’s a BEE:LEO pool too! I didn’t have much to swap but every little bit helped.

As advised, I had held off on completing the majority of the Zealy Power Up quests. I think had done the first two small ones, leaving the ones that wanted LEO powerups of:

• 200 LEO
• 400 LEO
• 800 LEO
• 1500 LEO
• 5000 LEO

That’s 7,900 LEO! So I did the first four last night, as the final boss of 5,000 required those ones to be approved first. Today I dropped the last 5,000… plus a small extra powerup of a little more than 100 to get me over 8K.

That should be good enough for both the associated NFTs!
 

Speculating on future value

Was it worth the $300 or so?

To me, that’s not an enormous amount to “gamble” with. If I were going to a casino for an evening, I might bring half that amount to throw at the craps table. Leo Finance is far from a game of chance, so I’m comfortable with the investment.

LF has shown strong dedication to shipping product, developing communications programs, and involving and energizing the wider Hive community into action (all during a crypto bear). So long as they can survive until market sentiments shift bullish again, I’m confident I’ll get my $300 back (and more, likely). Leo Finance is easily one of the strongest communities and projects on this chain, so I feel the risk is quite tolerable.

That, plus all the bonus rewards today, inspired my decision!

Happy staking, Lion frens 🙂
 

Thanks for stopping by and reading. The hero image at the top was made with a Canva Pro License and uses the Leo Finance logo.