The Leo ecosystem is expanding.

We are seeing a lot happening in a relatively short period of time. This is something that is providing excitement to the Leo community along with a sound foundation from which to build upon.

Leostrategy is something that started to get on people's radar. The layer 2 financial center brought out a couple of tokens, servicing different parts of the investment portfolio. Then we have some other applications which that team is working upon.

Overall, many feel the future is bright for Leo. With only 30 million $LEO tokens available, the scarcity model is in play.

In this article I will cover the 3 factors that will drive Leo over the next year.

1) Selling out of SURGE

The $SURGE token is one of the newer products from Leostrategy.

This is a convertible bond which provides not only a yield but also offers the capture of upside movement in the underlying asset. In this case, it is LEO.

SURGE is having a pre-sale before it starts to actively trade. There are still over 370K tokens available at a discounted price. This equates to the raising of 1.4 million $HIVE or 2.5 million LEO.

Obviously, this can change as the pricing of each token moves.

The point here is we are looking at another 2 million LEO being moving into permanent value lock. Couple this with the 2.25 already in there and we can see 4M-5M potentially removed from the sell side of the equation.

Again, there are only 30 million available so this would account for somewhere around 15%.

The upcoming move to Base will have a significant impact. That opens up the sale to a wider segment of the crypto community. It will also allow the purchase with fiat currency since Base is run by Coinbase.

1. Market Maker

Here we have another long discussed idea, being a market maker.

Leostrategy is developing an application that can take advantage of the volatility between the different Leo tokens There are 3 tokens (LEO, LSTR, SURGE) along with their wrapped versions. Some have liquidity pools that can also be arbitraged.

The market maker will be whitelisted from the normal bridging fees, providing a built in moat. This should make it hard for other bots to compete. Hence, the majority of the arbitrage money will go to Leostrategy, which is used to buy more LEO and lock it up.

1. Perpetuals Coming To LeoDex

This is a money maker for exchanges.

Here is a thread I posted last night after reviewing the 24 hour volumes on Binance.

@taskmaster4450le/re-leothreads-27krt4ddz

We need to keep in mind this is one exchange with 4 pairs. There are hundreds of pairs spread across many exchanges. To calculate the total would be a monumental task.

Even looking at these pairs, we can see the numbers. We are talking about more than $35 billion in a 24 hour period.

What does a sliver of that pie look like in trading fees?

Perpetual contracts are not designed for investors. They are mostly trading vehicles, catering to those who love to speculate. Of course, like most derivatives, things go both ways. Perps can be used as a hedge against one's portfolio.

The key takeaway is these contracts keep trading. That means the volume, over time, will simply increase as more activity occurs.

LeoDex is about to add this feature. If marketed properly by the community, we could see a significant uptick in trading volume each day on the DEX.