![image.png](https://images.hive.blog/DQmPv2jJVCK4GRQjVZVBKLyUdb2isBvDW9qfAN56Wq8fMRj/image.png)

The past several weeks have been pretty crazy for LeoFinance. In terms of price appreciation, we've seen another 2x in the token price of WLEO and LEO.. taking us from around $0.22 to currently $0.50. The alt rally has begun and we're already seeing cryptos like Ethereum (ETH) take off after BTC. This has led WLEO (and LEO) to follow the trending alt market. 

$0.50 is the highest LEO has ever been. Considering how small and new our project is (less than 2 years old and less than a $3M market cap), we still have a long ways to go. Most of us here believe this project to be worth a lot more than its current market cap and as our major updates for 2021 are rolled out (atomic swaps, our new second layer for LEO, decentralized node network, LeoFi, etc.), we're going to see a massive shift in the overall scale of LeoFinance as a platform.

![image.png](https://images.hive.blog/DQmWmmAGc8HYihvhuqAVcN22Xon3BuMXHtMFuN3s9toQqGA/image.png)

**Rapid Fire Dev Updates:**

LeoFinance.io is an interface to social media engagement on the blockchain. Our UI is currently connected to Twitter, Metamask (Ethereum) and Hive. This allows users to seamlessly utilize the 3 to login, engage and even interact with multiple blockchain assets from any device. As the project is continually developed, you'll see more wallet integrations, cross-chain collaborations and more. We're currently working with 2 other major blockchain developers (one app and one blockchain team itself) to integrate more cross-chain functionality to LeoFinance.

With LeoFi on the horizon, it's not hard to imagine collaterlized assets, lending, delegation leases and even synthetic assets arriving to the LeoFinance platform (and LEO token economy) within the first half of 2021. 

To wrap this all up with a neat bow, we're launching a decentralized node network on top of the Hive blockchain. This will allow anyone to spin up a simple node that will verify sidechain blocks for the LEO token. The testnet for our new token will be out very soon (weeks, not months) and we will begin open stress testing. After we're comfortable with the testnet development, we'll deprecate the LEO token on Hive-Engine/scotbot and migrate our operations to our own second layer that is truly decentralized, robust and *extremely fast*. 

.. and project ___ is like a nice cherry on top of our 2021 sundae. Hinting at the future potential for us to utlilize core LeoFinance infrastructure (our UI base code, LeoInfra, Leo Lightning DB, new second layer oracle network, etc.) in order to launch sister projects with their own token economies that ultimately feed back to LEO. First via token airdrops to LEO POWER/WLEO LPs/LEOM/LEOMM holders and gradually over time as we plug the tokens together via our second-layer.  

2020 is forming to be a great warmup for 2021. Strap in 🚀

## Top 30 LEO Author Reward Leaderboard

Our project has seen a massive level of growth in terms of new authors, curators and readers on the site. Our [Alexa Rank](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/leofinance.io) is about to cross the sub 40k mark globally and the number of daily authors has more than tripled in recent months. 

With all of these new users, we've seen a lot of movement in terms of token rewards. More users = more competition for rewards as a wider set of people are creating content, earning and staking rewards to curate for APY yield. 

The top 30 authors for December include a lot of new faces and movement in terms of token flow to the top authors. As with any system, once you make it to the top it can be hard for someone to take your spot. With that in mind, we're still seeing a lot of new faces enter/exit the top 30 author list while simultaneously seeing the *LEO token rewards* of the top authors decrease (even though the USD value of these rewards continue to increase).

It's hard to imagine our token economy being any healthier than it already is, but through curation and other community efforts, the distribution can get even wider and healthier than it is today. Keep up the manual curation and continue to welcome our massive influx of new users both from Hive and outside of Hive (i.e. Twitter signups @ 30+ new signups per day) to the platform with your upvotes and encouraging comments.

**Last Month**, the top 25 authors earned 26,160 LEO and 33,101 HIVE in author rewards only.

**This Month**, the top 30 authors earned 22,933 LEO and 40,307 HIVE as LEO rewards have continued to widen out to a larger pool of users.

It's funny to hear arguments about the LEO rewards pool not being distributed widely enough. Much like earning money (as many of us have experienced lately with the rising value of BTC, ETH and LEO), is it ever really ***enough***?

You can always earn more money.
You can always have a wider distribution.

What I'm tracking - and what many other in the community like to track - is the **widening** of the distribution relative to the previous months. Compare LEOs distribution to something like Bitcoin or even Hive and it may not look as healthy - since the platform is far younger and far smaller. Compare LEOs distribution to itself in the prior months and you'll see that we continue to grow our user base and the the width of rewards. 

Notice here that the top authors earned far less *LEO tokens* than the previous month cycle. Although track the difference in USD value of these rewards:

**Last month**, the top 25 authors earned $6,801.54 USD in LEO token rewards and $4,303.16 USD in HIVE rewards.

**This Month**, the top 30 authors earned $11,467 USD in LEO token rewards and $5,240 USD in HIVE rewards.

That's an increase of $4,666 USD (+68.6%) in LEO token rewards (priced in USD value) for the top authors on the platform in December. Meanwhile, these authors actually earned 3,227 ***less*** LEO tokens as compared to November - a ***decrease*** of 12.33%. 

Again, these are interesting dynamics to keep track of. We started these reports 6 months ago and the widening of rewards is both clear and astonishing. We're seeing exponential growth on all fronts and at this rate, the LEO token will be in way more hands 6 months from now. As with every network, the time to earn is as early as you possibly can. Waiting means joining when there is more competition for the same (or even smaller) rewards pool. 

<sub>note: due to community requests, we increased the leaderboard from top 25 to top 30 - we did something similar a few months back as users requested the original top 20 be increased to top 25. Real-time leaderboard coming soon too ;) </sub>

| Rank |      Author      |  LEO $ | HIVE $ | Total $ |
|:----:|:----------------:|:------:|:------:|:-------:|
|   1  | @taskmaster4450  | $1,150 |   $875 |  $2,025 |
|   2  | @rollandthomas   |   $883 |   $151 |  $1,034 |
|   3  | @jrcornel        |   $822 |   $441 |  $1,263 |
|   4  | @edicted         |   $812 |   $406 |  $1,218 |
|   5  | @trumpman        |   $535 |   $125 |    $660 |
|   6  | @khaleelkazi     |   $514 |   $291 |    $805 |
|   7  | @lbi-token       |   $510 |    $62 |    $571 |
|   8  | @dalz            |   $460 |   $199 |    $659 |
|   9  | @scaredycatguide |   $452 |   $127 |    $579 |
|  10  | @acesontop       |   $415 |   $141 |    $556 |
|  11  | @behiver         |   $380 |    $76 |    $456 |
|  12  | @tarazkp         |   $330 |   $584 |    $914 |
|  13  | @jondoe          |   $324 |   $173 |    $497 |
|  14  | @shortsegments   |   $316 |    $70 |    $386 |
|  15  | @cflclosers      |   $274 |    $54 |    $329 |
|  16  | @hitmeasap       |   $273 |    $84 |    $357 |
|  17  | @chekohler       |   $269 |   $161 |    $430 |
|  18  | @whatageek       |   $256 |    $74 |    $330 |
|  19  | @r1s2g3          |   $251 |    $51 |    $302 |
|  20  | @spinvest        |   $241 |    $62 |    $303 |
|  21  | @celi130         |   $240 |    $27 |    $266 |
|  22  | @filotasriza3    |   $236 |   $119 |    $355 |
|  23  | @coyotelation    |   $219 |    $32 |    $251 |
|  24  | @cryptoandcoffee |   $213 |   $208 |    $420 |
|  25  | @josediccus      |   $202 |   $184 |    $386 |
|  26  | @forexbrokr      |   $185 |    $25 |    $210 |
|  27  | @nealmcspadden   |   $182 |    $70 |    $252 |
|  28  | @themarkymark    |   $180 |   $268 |    $448 |
|  29  | @katerinaramm    |   $177 |    $75 |    $252 |
|  30  | @gualteramarelo  |   $166 |    $27 |    $193 |

*For this period, we used the current LEO and HIVE USD values ($0.50 and $0.13 respectively).*

## Top 30 LEO Authors Ranked by Reward Dominance

The following is a chart ranking these same top 30 authors by the dominance of their LEO rewards. LEO % stands for the percentage of total USD rewards earned by these authors as LEO tokens. 

As the LEO price continues to rise (more than 2x from November to December), we've seen an even greater level of dominance for LEO rewards. We've believed for a long time that second-layer tokenization is the key to rewarding users on the Hive blockchain and these posts have not only tracked our progress in flippening Hive rewards (in terms of value earned per month by top authors) but it has validated this idea that the second layer provides feritle ground for better rewards distribution, targeted curation and more relevant content creation. 

**Last Month**, LEO reward dominance showed the top 25 authors had an average of 66.71% of their total monthly rewards (in USD terms) coming from LEO and 33.29% coming from Hive.

**This Month**, LEO reward dominance showed the top 30 authors had an average of 72.12% of their total monthly rewards (in USD terms) coming from LEO and 27.88% coming from Hive.

| Rank |      Author      | Total $ |  LEO Dominance % |
|:----:|:----------------:|:-------:|:------:|
|   1  | @celi130         |    $266 | 89.90% |
|   2  | @lbi-token       |    $571 | 89.20% |
|   3  | @forexbrokr      |    $210 | 88.07% |
|   4  | @coyotelation    |    $251 | 87.28% |
|   5  | @gualteramarelo  |    $193 | 86.12% |
|   6  | @rollandthomas   |  $1,034 | 85.39% |
|   7  | @cflclosers      |    $329 | 83.43% |
|   8  | @behiver         |    $456 | 83.34% |
|   9  | @r1s2g3          |    $302 | 83.14% |
|  10  | @shortsegments   |    $386 | 81.86% |
|  11  | @trumpman        |    $660 | 81.07% |
|  12  | @spinvest        |    $303 | 79.45% |
|  13  | @scaredycatguide |    $579 | 78.07% |
|  14  | @whatageek       |    $330 | 77.51% |
|  15  | @hitmeasap       |    $357 | 76.59% |
|  16  | @acesontop       |    $556 | 74.56% |
|  17  | @nealmcspadden   |    $252 | 72.28% |
|  18  | @katerinaramm    |    $252 | 70.30% |
|  19  | @dalz            |    $659 | 69.85% |
|  20  | @edicted         |  $1,218 | 66.67% |
|  21  | @filotasriza3    |    $355 | 66.57% |
|  22  | @jondoe          |    $497 | 65.18% |
|  23  | @jrcornel        |  $1,263 | 65.07% |
|  24  | @khaleelkazi     |    $805 | 63.82% |
|  25  | @chekohler       |    $430 | 62.64% |
|  26  | @taskmaster4450  |  $2,025 | 56.80% |
|  27  | @josediccus      |    $386 | 52.42% |
|  28  | @cryptoandcoffee |    $420 | 50.57% |
|  29  | @themarkymark    |    $448 | 40.24% |
|  30  | @tarazkp         |    $914 | 36.10% |

## Updates, Whitepaper, Atomic Swaps and Airdrops

The amount of updates (and yes, announcements of announcements) are piling up. It's been hard to organize the exact order to release the updates in but I've mentioned in a few places that we ended up deciding to release a massive whitepaper containing our current projects, future announcements and roadmap. Along with that whitepaper, we'll follow it up with smaller update posts for each development as they roll out (similar to our normal update schedule). 

With the expanded number of devs working on LeoFinance projects simultaneously, a lot of updates are going to drop in rapid succession. 

The rough order looks like the following:
1. Lightning DB
2. Whitepaper
3. Sidechain Testnet
4. Project ___
5. Airdrop #1 (project ___)
6. Airdrop #2 (governance token) 

<sub>*This has been your regularly scheduled announcement of future announcements. More announcements will be announced this coming week.*</sub>

&nbsp;
https://images.hive.blog/DQmVsxUBNSEttko3J3d7LDXL9BWGYLXLXAs798Z1EPjeUdf/image.png
&nbsp;

LeoFinance is a blockchain-based social media platform for Crypto & Finance content creators. Our [tokenized app](https://leofinance.io) allows users and creators to engage and share content on the blockchain while earning cryptocurrency rewards.

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