UNUS SED LEO

LEO is the exchange token of iFinex, the owner of Bitfinex, giving fee discounts and funded by buybacks from exchange revenue.

LEO was issued in May 2019 by Unus Sed Leo Limited, a special-purpose subsidiary of iFinex, the British Virgin Islands company that runs the Bitfinex exchange. Up to 1 billion LEO were offered at 1 USDt (Tether) each in a private sale outside the United States. The sale came after Bitfinex could not recover about $850 million held by the payment processor Crypto Capital, and the proceeds could be used for working capital and to repay debt. LEO is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, created on 21 May 2019, and also exists on EOS.

LEO gives no share in iFinex and no dividends. Its value rests on burn commitments: every month iFinex promised to buy back LEO worth at least 27% of its gross revenue from the previous month, until no tokens are left in circulation. It also promised to buy back and burn LEO with at least 95% of any funds recovered from Crypto Capital and at least 80% of funds recovered from the 2016 Bitfinex hack. In January 2025 US prosecutors asked a court to return 94,643 of the stolen bitcoin to Bitfinex, but the return was still tied up in court in 2026 and no hack-recovery burn had been reported.

At launch LEO mainly cut Bitfinex trading fees. Since December 2025 Bitfinex charges no trading fees to anyone, so LEO's remaining discounts are on the fee Bitfinex takes from lenders in its margin funding and Borrow products and on withdrawal and deposit fees. On 27 September 2026 CoinGecko counted about 919.9 million LEO in circulation out of a total supply of about 985.2 million, and ranked it 19th by market value, although daily trading volume was very low.

iFinex publishes no audited accounts, so outsiders cannot check whether buybacks match the 27% commitment. Bitfinex and the stablecoin issuer Tether are controlled by the same small group of people. In 2021 both settled with the New York Attorney General over hiding the Crypto Capital loss and Tether's backing, and were barred from dealing with New Yorkers; the US regulator CFTC also fined Bitfinex for leveraged trading with US persons.