My friends, we're going to compare LEO to Internet Computer Protocol, because that's what you all just asked me to do. Internet Computer Protocol is the best tech, the most advanced technology by far in crypto, with the biggest research and development team. And it actually has a smaller market cap than LEO.
LEO is actually difficult for me to even figure out where this token is and what it does, because the website goes straight to Bitfinex, and that's where I end up eventually finding the white paper. And you all told me that basically LEO is like Bitfinex's version of BNB. If you look at the metrics, some of the explorers don't even work. Others only say there are 2,800 holders for the ERC-20 version of this, with the top wallet having 98%. So I see some big problems with LEO, especially considering how big the market cap is. This is a market cap around maybe even double what Internet Computer is right now.
With LEO, I end up asking why I got into crypto in the first place
With LEO, I end up thinking, why did I get into crypto? What really excited me about Bitcoin is the value proposition of removing the middleman, so that you and I could transact without having a, quote, trusted third party between our transaction, like a bank or a government that takes the money from me and then gives it to you.
Well, when you have a cryptocurrency exchange, what you've done is now there's a huge middleman. And that's a problem for me when it comes to crypto investing. I do not want to invest where I'm funding some centralized entity. With the LEO token, you are funding Bitfinex, which, there have been some issues with over the years. I used Bitfinex at one point, and it's not an exchange I would use today.
What do you even do with the LEO token?
So if you want to know, what do you even do with the LEO token? Why would you even have it? The main benefit that it looks like you get from the LEO token is the fee schedule. You get a discount on trading fees, and then based on the amount of LEO, you can get savings on the fees. However, these days, some exchanges like Binance and MEXC at various points had a 0 trading fee. So holding LEO tokens compared to having a 0 trading fee, it seems like you'd be better off to use another exchange instead of holding a bunch of LEO to get less.
Now, it also says LEO holders have voting rights on Bitfinex that in theory allow you to participate in a decision-making process, which could include listing new cryptos or changing trading rules. And then it says LEO token holders also have access to exclusive services and products. However, this token has very limited utility outside of the Bitfinex ecosystem. As you can tell by it being on Ethereum, having 2,800 holders versus the circulating supply is way off. That's way off. And then on EOS, there are also links to an EOS explorer, one of which wasn't even working properly, and the other one has very little information. So it looks like almost everyone holding these tokens is actually holding them on the exchange.
That means there's a massive risk. If something happens to Bitfinex, then LEO is absolutely going down with it. The problem is, if Bitfinex is very profitable and does well, that doesn't necessarily mean that the LEO token holders get a good deal. The price is only up 39% over the last year, which is not that impressive in my view. There's a lot of other stuff that has gone up more. This is the kind of exchange-token problem I keep coming back to when I review coins in my Money playlist, and it's the same concern I had with the BitGet token (BGB).
Why I see ICP as the asymmetric bet, and LEO as the opposite
Generally, if you're going to hold a larger market cap crypto, ideally it should be a very asymmetric risk. Asymmetric means that, from what I see for ICP, there's a very small downside to ICP based on the tech, based on the team behind it. I see it as one of the safer cryptos to invest in, in my experience, which is why I have over 5,000 ICP. And it's why I don't have any LEO, because I've researched these before, and the LEO token has never appealed to me.
Even if you just look at price action, ICP is up 77% over the year versus 39% for LEO. And a big question is, where is this going to go in the future? LEO is almost double ICP, but does LEO have even a tenth of a percent of the growth potential that ICP has?
If you look at ICP, this is a revolutionary first true third generation blockchain that reinvents compute, where you can directly put an entire Web3 social network directly on chain, an entire order book exchange directly on chain. You can put AI on chain. This is the first blockchain in the world that AI has actually been run on. That's huge. And this has chain fusion, where it's got the first Bitcoin and Ethereum layer two. There's so much potential for ICP, and the organic growth for ICP is incredible, as I've just talked about. I just bought 111 ICP. This ICP has massive potential, and it has a huge team behind it, the largest research and development team in blockchain.
So if I'm holding an ICP token and the technology is allowing people to do things you can't do anywhere else, and solving real-world problems, like a solution to cybercrime, which according to estimates is a $10 trillion problem in 2025 and is already multi-trillions of dollars today. Building on ICP is one of the easiest, simplest, most cost-effective solutions to avoid the vast majority of cybercrime that happens, which means there's a ton of real-world utility.
If you look at all this on the dashboard, ICP is doing thousands of transactions per second. The amount of ICP holders has nearly doubled in the last few months. The amount of actual computation being done on the blockchain on average has tripled every year since this came out. And Dominic Williams thinks we're going to start doing like a 10x every year as things like AI on chain and some of these partnerships start to take off. If you want the full case for the technology, I keep building on it in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Comparing the two: where I think each one is headed
So what I see, comparing the two of these, is that I think Internet Computer Protocol has a good shot to jump up to number three, because it should be worth as much as Ethereum based on the tech. And because the tech is so good, there are going to be more meme coins that launch on ICP, because there's just so much more you can do with a meme coin. You can get your meme coin listed on OpenChat, which is the best place that I've ever seen to build a crypto community. Then you can list it and do airdrops and giveaways directly. For example, anybody in my chat can just do a giveaway for any meme coin they've got to promote it. You can just click this gift box, pick any coin that you've actually got some of. In terms of meme coin promotion and functionality, ICP's tech just for meme coins is vastly superior to anything else on the market. People just are still hearing about it. But once they get on ICP, there's such huge potential afterwards. If you ever want to go through your own portfolio with me, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and ask me directly.
Whereas with LEO, Bitfinex is not the leading crypto exchange. And because it's an exchange token, it's not traded on Binance. It's not traded on Coinbase. If you go on CoinMarketCap and look around, there usually is an exchanges tab. If you look at the exchanges tab right now, Binance is number one. At least in terms of looking at this day, Coinbase is number two, OKX is number three, then Bybit, Upbit, Kraken, Gate.io, and Bitfinex, according to CoinMarketCap's data, which I believe CoinMarketCap is linked in with Binance. So maybe they don't like Bitfinex, or whatever. But according to this, at least, Bitfinex is the ninth exchange according to CoinMarketCap, and according to CoinGecko it's the eighth.
So you've got these other exchanges that are much larger than Bitfinex, and yet the token for LEO, the only exchange coin bigger than LEO, is BNB. And these exchange tokens are, as I just showed in the explorer, extremely centralized. So we don't have a good idea who actually holds all this, other than that this one Bitfinex wallet has 98% of all the tokens on Ethereum. So this is absolutely centralized, even beyond what BNB looks like.
My verdict: I would not put money in LEO instead of ICP
So to me, holding the LEO token is absolutely not worth the benefits you get on Bitfinex, because there are lots of other crypto exchanges you can use, and there's a big potential risk to holding this token. This already had its first bull market, and unlike a lot of coins it actually went up higher. But because this is so centrally held, it can be very easily manipulated, and it looks like almost nobody trades it outside of Bitfinex.
So this is definitely not a coin I would invest in. It doesn't look like it's worth it at all to me. I certainly wouldn't want to have money in this instead of in ICP. If you want to go deeper on this whole theme, I think it's worth understanding why I believe crypto exchanges themselves are threatened by ICP.