Volume One, 2021: LeoFinance's Most Explosive Year of Growth Yet | 12 New Team Members, LeoMobile, LeoInfra, CubFinance and More!

almost 3 years ago (Edited)

Volume 1 2021 LeoFinance's Most Explosive Year of Growth Yet 12 New Team Members, LeoMobile, LeoInfra, CubFinance and More!.png

2021 has been a ridiculously awesome year for LeoFinance. We've grown far beyond what many people believed possible. While this year has been packed with incredible product releases, updates and community growth, all of this growth has also brought on one of our greatest challenges yet: Growing Pains.

Read Volume Two

Read Volume Three

Growing pains has been the narrative of LeoFinance as an organization for the past 6-8 months. Basically since the launch of CubFinance and our expansion further into the world of DeFi.

With all of these new tools and applications coming into the LeoFinance ecosystem, we've seen expansion on a level that nobody anticipated. With this expansion comes a lot of challenges. We needed to hire so many more people to handle the development, upkeep and overall administration for all of these aspects of LeoFinance.

LeoFinance today - here at the end of 2021 - is not the LeoFinance that entered 2021. Our team has added 12 new members and is nearly 20 people strong as of today. It's truly amazing to have a front-row seat to all of this. While the frustrations can be overwhelming, the growth has been phenomenal and the community has stuck with us as we learn a new game of organization and development at scale.

In this post, we want to give a brief (not-so-brief) recap of 2021. While recent developments have been slower than many people may have wanted, we truly believe that it was for the better. This is singling out the development of PolyCUB which turned out to be one of the hardest things we've built to-date.

While the wait has been arduous, it has also been fruitful. By taking our time to develop the tokenomics, contracts and underlying mechanics of the platform, we've managed to take all of the best of DeFi and merge it into one. PolyCUB is going to blow the minds of everyone on CUB, LeoFinance, Hive and the broader Polygon space.

We've got partnerships lined up and mechanics galore. I have not been this excited about a launch since the initial weeks of CubFinance. PolyCUB is going to change everything for CUB and for LEO as we see the airdrop to CUB holders merged with Protocol-Controlled Value, CUB Bonding, Polygon LEO (pLEO), LeoBridge V2 (BSC->Polygon, Polygon->BSC) and so much more.

For now, let's recap 2021 - the most incredible (and challenging) year for LeoFinance yet!

Overview

I'm writing this before I even start compiling the list of achievements we've had in 2021. I can already feel a 5,000 word+ blog post coming. So here's a guide to help keep this organized:

^{edit: Just crossed 10,000 words, hope you brought your reading glasses and a cup of coffee!}

December 30th, 2020: LeoFinance.io V2 P2 Release Notes | 21 Minutes of Development Updates
December 31st, 2020 Is LEO Turning Into a Holding Company? | Vision for 2021 and Beyond
January 3rd, 2021 LEO Crosses $0.35 | New All-Time High, Geyser Yields and What's Next
January 17, 2021 LeoInfra Onboarding Report | 300+ Active Hive Lite Accounts Onboarded and Counting
January 26, 2021 Introducing the Leo Lightning DB Layer for Hive | Speed of Web2, Principles of Web3
February 28th, 2021 WLEO LPs Earned $20k From Geyser #3 | Announcing Two Major DeFi Products for Q1
March 8th, 2021 Introducing Cub Finance | LeoFinance Expands Into DeFi on the Binance Smart Chain
March 10th, 2021 The First Ever Cross-Chain Hybrid Claimdrop | Completely Redesigned and CUB Drop is Now Live!
March 15th, 2021 The Cub Finance AMA on BSC Gemz Telegram (Full Transcript)
March 17th, 2021 Introducing DEC Farming on Cub Finance | Changes to Dens/Farms, 24 Hours Left for Wrapping CUB
March 18th, 2021 CUB Listed on CoinMarketCap, $600k in Daily Volume, LeoBridge Update and Code Audits
March 24th, 2021 CUB Block Reward Halvening, Upcoming Features and Our Mission for Sustainable DeFi
March 26th, 2021 UI Refresh, LeoBridge, Kingdoms Release and Major Farms/Dens Update
May 8th, 2021 Introducing LeoBridge: Permissionless Cross-Chain Swaps ERC20 -> BEP20
May 12th, 2021 LeoFinance UI Update | Kingdoms, CUB, Marketing and Communication
May 15th, 2021 LeoFinance x CUB Weekly Community AMA Session #1 | LeoBridge, Kingdoms and LeoFinance in 5 Years
June 4th, 2021 Kingdoms Soft Launch, New Tokenomics & New UI | CUB x LeoFinance AMA in 12 Hours
June 10th, 2021 Introducing CUB Kingdoms | Cross-Platform Autocompounding Yield Vaults
June 15th, 2021 Introducing CUB Staking Kingdom | Autonomous BNB Rewards and Autocompounding
June 21st, 2021 LeoBridge: The Future of the LEO Token Economy
June 29th, 2021 Introducing the BTCB-BNB Cub Kingdom | Vault Migration Status: 4/7
July 6th, 2021 Introducing Autosave, Advanced Drafts, Scheduling and New Publishing UI
July 9th, 2021 Updated CUB Docs & Roadmap | Kingdoms Phase 4, IDO Launchpad, Polygon
July 14th, 2021 Kingdoms Full Launch Event | BTC, ETH and USD Stablecoin Staking - 500% APYs
July 30th, 2021 Kingdoms UI Update | Data Displays, API Improvements and CUB IDO FAQ
August 5th, 2021 LeoFinance Weekly Dev Update
August 12th, 2021 LeoFinance Weekly Dev Update #2
August 18th, 2021 Introducing LeoFi | Decentralized Leasing Marketplace for LEO POWER
August 19th, 2021 LeoFinance Weekly Dev Update #3 | New LeoFi App, 1st IDO, Geyser Successfully Automated
August 20th, 2021 The 3 Stages of CUB - IDOs Are Another Fundamental Tokenomics Upgrade
August 25th, 2021 Introducing CUB's Decentralized IDO Launchpad: Economics, Impacts and How to Participate
September 3rd, 2021 LeoFinance Weekly Dev Update #5 | Mobile App Rollout, HP Leasing, $125k CUB Burned
September 11th, 2021 Major Update to CUB IDO System | IDO #2, #3, #4
September 21st, 2021 CubFinance V2 Day! | Tutorial on The V2 Migration, Rollout Schedules and 0 Deposit Fee day!
September 30th, 2021 2 New CUB Kingdoms! | SPS-BNB Kingdom & BTCB-BNB BakerySwap Update (Action Required)
October 11th, 2021 LeoFinance Weekly Dev Recap #7 | Mobile App v0.0.12, Leo Podcast, Marketing, IDOs and Kingdoms TVL $6m+
October 30th, 2021 Introducing LeoMobile on Android | Web3 and Community Tokenization at Your Finger Tips!
November 1st, 2021 Introducing PolyCUB | Preparing for Launch, Tokenomics, Airdrop Details & Partnerships
November 8th, 2021 PolyCUB Mechanics Spotlight | Protocol-Controlled Value
November 17th, 2021 LeoMobile: LeoFinance's Hive-Based Web3 App Updated in the Google Play Store + LeoInfra V3 in Final Testing
November 28th, 2021 Call to Action! | Hive and LeoFinance Mentioned As One of The Top Ways to Earn Crypto!
December 10th, 2021 Airdrop Madness! | Hive Blockchain Airdrops, PolyCUB Airdrop, IDO #2 Airdrop!?
December 13th, 2021 LeoFinance NFTs, Play-to-Earn Games and New Subcommunities Mobile App Feature
December 17th, 2021 LeoMobile is Now Live on IOS! | A Fast, Seamless and Intuitive Web3 Experience
December 25th, 2021 Introducing Hivestats V3 | Featured Content, New Price Displays, APY Opportunities & HBD Implementation
December 30th, 2021 Introducing Hivestats V3 Phase 2 | Rewritten Backend and 60x Speed Improvement + 500 LEO Bounty Contest
Conclusion

1). December 30th, 2020: LeoFinance.io V2 P2 Release Notes | 21 Minutes of Development Updates

What better way to kick off this post than to talk about the final release notes of 2020. We closed out the year of 2020 by talking about all of the amazing features we added to the custom Hive UI that we built from the ground-up. No other Hive community had tackled the building of its own UI up to this point and we were absolutely crushing it on the development pace of LeoFinance.io.

In that update, we introduced 24 major additions to the UI:

Onboarding
- (1) Improved Get Started Dialog
- (2) LeoInfra V2 Integrations
New Features
- (3) Current LEO Voting Power Display
- (4) Real-Time Tokenomics Widget
- (5) New Payout Displays: USD, LEO or USD/LEO
- (6) Auto Post to Twitter
- (7) Auto Reblog
- (8) Schedule Posts
- (9) Actions Queue
- (10) Promote Post Functionality
- (11) Share to Social Media
- (12) Author Mute Function and Button
- (13) New Curator's Picks Page
- (14) Updated Navbar
- (15) Smart Tag Suggestions
- (16) Permalink Editor
Massive Wallet UI Overhaul
- (17) Delegation Info & Manager
- (18) TXID Links to Blockchain TXs
- (19) Memo Data
- (20) Pagination
- (21) WLEO Wallet UI
Styling Updates
- (22) "Mediumify" Content Displays
- (23) Tag Slider Added to All Feed Pages
- (24) Open External Links in a New Tab

What you see today is the continued development of https://leofinance.io up until we made the discovery and subsequent decision to merge https://leofinance.io (desktop) with the LeoMobile framework to create an entirely new UI.

Once we decided that this was the path forward, we radically changed the development roadmap of LeoFinance.io. Pivoting a full 360 degrees to a new path of developing for LeoMobile first and then merging the framework with our desktop app to make a hand-in-hand experience like no other.

We're making Web3 accessible to the entire world. What you're seeing today with LeoMobile is what will lead the charge of everything moving forward. ProjectBlank, LeoFinance.io, LeoInfra, LeoLightning... This is all coming together on the back of LeoMobile developments. It's fun to see how far we've come from this last development update that closed out 2020.

2). December 31st, 2020 Is LEO Turning Into a Holding Company? | Vision for 2021 and Beyond

I reflected the end of 2020 on my personal account and forshadowed what would happen in 2021. It's a fun read - especially because nobody was aware of what the LeoFinance team was cooking up in the background.

We saw the boom of DeFi on the cusp of happening and we were pouring hours of blood, sweat and tears to position LeoFinance ahead of the curve. With CubFinance, we did just that.

We fulfilled the early stages of this mission to make LEO (LeoFinance) an "umbrella project" for a wider range of ecosystem products. Connecting ourselves to the bleeding edge of a multi-chain future.

I don't think anyone (myself included) realized what exactly we were doing at the time. It felt like we were on the edge of the universe, feeling our way through the darkness as it expanded beneath our feet.

Once more: we got a massive lesson in growing pains as an organization. We simply did not have enough people nor resources to handle the expansion that was coming. It was happening far to fast for what we had known in the past but the very challenge of that expansion is what led us to turn LeoFinance into a true organization, tripling the size of the team and bringing about a radical improvement to the process and way that we handle developments toward the end of 2021.

3). January 3rd, 2021 LEO Crosses $0.35 | New All-Time High, Geyser Yields and What's Next

We started off 2021 with a bang. WLEO V2 had finally taken hold and we worked so hard to make that a reality. LEO exploded from $0.20 to $0.35 and made all-time record highs.

We were just getting started and this foretold a much bigger picture that was about to happen... LEO was about to explode to $1+ for the first time in our history.

LEO has had a volatile 2021 from a price perspective. Ironically, we're entering 2022 at a slightly higher price ($0.24 vs. $0.19) that we entered 2021 with.

I think this explosive growth we saw at the start of 2021 is going to become even more ironic as we see our growth explode once again in 2022. We've seen a lot happen over this past year and while it might be disheartening to know that the price is exiting the year at nearly the same valuation, it's important to keep in mind how much growth LeoFinance has seen as an organization.

The growing pains and delays have caused FUD over the price (something I addressed in a post just a few days ago. This FUD will be short-lived and development delays happen. Thorchain told everyone they'd have mainnet out by Christmas and now the current estimates are sometime between Q1 and Q3 2022 for that.

When you're building something for the long-term. Something that is a long, challenging and development-intense project, delays are par for the course. The future has never looked so bright for LeoFinance and I'm truly excited for what we're about to release with PolyCUB and what we're gearing up to release in Q2 of 2022.

I know that we've had a long year of delays, growing pains and other issues in this expansionary time but I also know that we're so much better for it. I can't wait to show the community and the world what we've achieved over the past 5 months (since July 2021) of hardcore development on projects like PolyCUB.

4). January 17, 2021 LeoInfra Onboarding Report | 300+ Active Hive Lite Accounts Onboarded and Counting

In early 2021, we had just deployed LeoInfra V1 to onboard the masses to Hive and Web3 through the LeoFinance.io UI that we built from the ground up.

LeoInfra was in its very early stages, but we were making a lot of headway on the project. We had just released "Hive Lite Accounts" - making us the first of any project on the Hive blockchain to achieve this long-held vision of easy signups to Hive.

We created this by developing a backend that would allow users to:

Authenticate themselves using a Web2 social media login (i.e. Twitter or Email Address)
Create a Hive username
Sign in

That's it! They wouldn't be thrown into the world of Web3 entirely at once and all up front. Instead, their keys would be held on a backend server, deeply encrypted. Only they could decrypt their keys when they were ready to take the leap of Web3 self-custody.

The Hive account would fully exist on the blockchain, but we considered these "Lite Accounts" because the user didn't yet have sole control over the account. That part would come later when the user felt more comfortable and inundated with LeoFinance and the Hive Blockchain.

Looking back on this onboarding report, it's amazing to see the progress. We had just onboarded 300 accounts and to-date we've now onboarded thousands of new Hive accounts. I'd like to revisit this reporting style (and I know many in the community have already asked for this) and do more reports about things like Onboarding the activity of accounts we sign up.

Last Week, we integrated LeoInfra V3 to LeoMobile.

LeoInfra V3 brings Facebook Lite Accounts to the LeoInfra backend. We also added a number of enhancements to the way LeoInfra works and integrated it to the LeoMobile application.

LeoMobile's mission is to make Web3 and Hive accessible to the masses. It's already an incredibly easy-to-use and intuitive process. Now, users who have a Facebook account or Twitter account can literally sign into Hive in less than 30 seconds without downloading any private keys or learning how a blockchain account works.

Now, we can allow anyone to easily onboard themselves. Then, we can take our time and teach them the proper methods of key storage and how a blockchain works.

January 26, 2021 Introducing the Leo Lightning DB Layer for Hive | Speed of Web2, Principles of Web3

Closing out the month of January, we had been working for a while on a new backend project called "Leo Lightning DB".

Much like the Bitcoin Lightning Layer, this Lightning DB is a second-layer solution that interacts with base-level operations.

By moving actions on https://leofinance.io - like comments, upvotes and caching posts and comments, we radically reduced the loading speed of many aspects of LeoFinance.

These delays caused a lot of headaches from the user perspective. While it may not seem like much, nobody wants to wait 3-10 seconds to upvote or comment. Nobody wants to wait 10 seconds for a post to load from the blockchain.

Instead, We Want The User Experience of LeoFinance to be the Principles of Web3 and the Speed of Web2

Hive gives us the principles of Web3 by providing a decentralized, scalable and fast database for storing user data and user generated content (UGC). One issue with Hive is that the APIs can sometimes slow down the display of data on the frontend. For the most part, this is not an issue at the first layer. You can find that there are small delays in certain actions (i.e. a few seconds delay for comments and other actions).

"A workaround is the Lightning Layer that we have developed.

The Lightning Layer is a database that exists on the backend of https://LeoFinance.io. When users commit actions on the frontend, they are instantaneously deployed to this layer and displayed on the UI frontend. From there, the layer speaks to the Hive blockchain directly and sends those actions to the chain."

We were really excited about this development. Many in the community came up with the initial idea and then our team went deep in the background to develop it. It was an arduous process, but it turned out to be well worth it.

LeoLightning DB Today

The truly amazing thing about LeoLightning DB is that it's so versatile. Today, we use LeoLightning to do a lot of amazing tasks.

Over the past several months, we implemented 5+ updates to Lightning DB in the background. We didn't talk about many of these updates throughout the past 3-5 months because they mostly impacted:

LeoMobile Development
Project Blank Development

We have a number of development updates that we want to walkthrough with the whole community. Many of these updates are waiting on public release of info related to Project Blank and also the release of LeoMobile (which just happened for IOS about 3 weeks ago and Android a few weeks before that).

LeoLightning is just getting started and it is a truly powerful caching layer on top of the Hive blockchain. LeoLightning DB is already used to power https://leofinance.io and LeoMobile. In the sooniverse, it will also power ProjectBlank.

February 28th, 2021 WLEO LPs Earned $20k From Geyser #3 | Announcing Two Major DeFi Products for Q1

LeoFinance had a few smaller development updates sprinkled throughout the month of February, but if you go back into the posting history, you will notice a bit of a "Going Dark" type of feel.

We spent the month of February with our heads down, focused on a lot of amazing developments. If you were around during this time, then you know exactly what we were working our asses off to achieve:

LeoFi Releases 2 Major DeFi Products in Q1 2021:

On to some of the fun announcements of announcements. I've already seen a few Leo detectives snooping around and putting together little breadcrumbs of what we're about to launch.

LeoFi is about to launch 2 major products on another blockchain. These developments will effectively make LeoFinance a tri-chain project (operating applications on 3 blockchains simultaneously).

Many projects boast about future interoperability but LeoFinance has interoperability today. Allowing you to blog and earn rewards on one chain (Hive) and seamlessly wrap those rewards onto another chain (ETH) and participate in DeFi (Uniswap Liquidity Pool).

In less than a week, two more products will enter the LeoFi branch of LeoFinance and introduce a number of interesting dynamics to the LEO (wLEO) token economy.

I think one of these projects is highly anticipated and everyone can guess what it is but the other is an entirely new beast. We're excited to see how the community reacts.

It's amazing to look back on how far we've come since this moment in time. We spent so much time building CubFinance and getting ready to dive head-first into the world of DeFi.

We really weren't prepared for what was about to happen...

We were about to see our entire project hit the spotlight.. the big spotlight. For the first time ever.

This expansion took our community and project to a whole new level, but as you may recall over the past 6-8 months, it also brought a new level of challenges.

By stepping up to the big leagues, we brought on a lot more management to the LeoFinance Project Ecosystem. We created a lot more work for the existing team - through development, app upkeep, tech support and all sorts of other expansionary-related headaches - to the need for new developers to continually tackle the development of new products for the LeoFinance and now CubFinance ecosystem.

March 8th, 2021 Introducing Cub Finance | LeoFinance Expands Into DeFi on the Binance Smart Chain

On March 8th, 2021 a historic event radically reshaped the LeoFinance Project forever.

The long-awaited day has finally arrived. Some LEO detectives have already made great guesses at what we're launching today but most people are in for a major surprise.

Over the past several weeks, we've been watching the meteoric rise of Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as it has attracted a lot of capital and trading volume from Ethereum. BSC offers low fees, faster transactions and superior scalability over ETH. With that also come some downsides - not quite as decentralized, less dApps (the chain is less than 6 months old), etc.

Binance Smart Chain has emerged as a major player in the DeFi space. Second only to Ethereum itself.

Fulfilling LeoFinance's Core Mission

LeoFinance's mission is to expand the scope and scale of our community and tokenized economy. In November 2020, we release wLEO and supercharged the LEO token economy by plugging directly into the deepest capital market available on the #1 DEX - Uniswap.

CubFinance reshaped the look and feel of being a LeoFinance 🦁 community member. We realized that to expand the scope and scale of our economy, we needed to step outside of our comfort zone and tackle an entirely new... and much larger! ... set of challenges.

Many have asked recently if LeoFinance has spread itself too thin. I vehemently disagree with this sentiment and the post I wrote recently titled "FUD" addresses it directly. Some also asked the question during our last live Weekly AMA chat and I answered it with what I beleive to be the future of all major crypto projects:

Multi-Chain Interoperability.

We're quickly headed into a Multi-Chain Future... Hell, that multi-chain future has already arrived. The Terra (LUNA) ecosystem has EXPLODED in recent months and there's a good reason for it... They built great products and made sure to make it easy to move seamlessly across blockchains.

The future of this Crypto Industry is multi-chain and LeoFinance was one of the first projects to be a multi-chain, interoperable solution with Wrapped LEO (wLEO).. then BEP20 LEO (bLEO) and shortly after this post is released, Polygon LEO (pLEO).

LeoFinance is a Web3 community. Our mission is to expand the width and depth of our community.

To expand in width means to gain more users and more attention from the broader Crypto and Financial world at large.

To expand in depth means to give our existing 🦁s more access, more Alpha and more opportunities to succeed.

This is the directive of our community and CubFinance led the charge in taking us further into the universe of a multi-chain future.

March 10th, 2021 The First Ever Cross-Chain Hybrid Claimdrop | Completely Redesigned and CUB Drop is Now Live!

Shortly after the release of CubFinance, we launched the first-ever Hybrid, Cross-Blockchain Claimdrop.

We had never seen any project do something similar, but we were happy to make this possible for the community. Looking at my notes from this time, I have to be completely honest:

We were way in over our heads on this one. Doing this claimdrop was an extremely difficult process and we made our lives hell for no reason. There were easier solutions out there that we simply didn't understand at the time.

This is the story of 2021 - in my honest opinion. We have tackled MASSIVE undertakings that have required our team to grow... Not just in numbers but in raw talent. Most recently with PolyCUB... We've been tackling some truly tough development challenges and organizational challenges.

These are the root cause of delayed launches and something that I have personally been overseeing and tackling in order to smooth out our processes and hire more amazing development talent. We would not be where we are today without the incredible developers who've made all of these applications possible.

The claimdrop was a great learning experience and something that we had to redesign on the fly to get it to actually work.

As with many of our developments, we move fast, break a lot of shit and learn on the fly. We're always pushing the bounds of our team and our projects itself. By doing this, we're always on the bleeding edge of development... and that entitles us to the blood part of putting our blood, sweat and tears into the developments of the LeoFinance ecosystem.

March 15th, 2021 The Cub Finance AMA on BSC Gemz Telegram (Full Transcript)

On March 15th and for the weeks surrounding this day we did a lot of marketing for CubFinance. We managed to bring in a lot of outside attention.

Signups for Hive accounts on https://leofinance.io reached all-time highs. Site traffic for LeoFinance and all of our applications also pushed all-time highs more broadly.

Other KPIs mooned as well. Posting on LeoFinance.io, token prices for LEO and CUB... Wen Moon became Now Moon for our entire community and all of the projects housed under the LeoFinance Parent Organization.

We did some AMAs and a few other great methods of getting the word about CUB and LeoFinance out there. We brought in a lot of external capital and users... TVL pushed $20m+ which was absolutely crazy.

We're extremely confident that a similar event is going to happen around the PolyCUB launch. Another massive influx of attention, capital and new users with the PolyCUB launch.

A lot of what we learned from the CUB launch is having the mechanisms and tools in place to handle the large load of new users.

We had a lot of site-based and general administration-based issues with all of this sudden increase in attention and awareness for LeoFinance and our suite of applications.

With all of these new users and traffic, we saw our applications lag and we had downtime for various vital aspects of LeoFinance - like our Tech Support, for example.

We've spent months preparing for the launch of PolyCUB and our aim is to create the same incredibly growth-inundating hype that we saw during the launch of CubFinance in March 2021. Our goal this time around is to have the capacity and organization in place to handle rapid growth... and handle it well.

We believe the launch of PolyCUB is what will reignite that fire we saw in the early days of CUB. Our goal on this launch is to sustain it by having better tools in place and a 3x larger team to handle the influx of development needs, tech support needs AND general administrative needs.

The whole community is going to rally around this launch and we'll see an influx like never before. We can't wait!

March 17th, 2021 Introducing DEC Farming on Cub Finance | Changes to Dens/Farms, 24 Hours Left for Wrapping CUB

Shortly after the launch of Cub, the Splinterlands team reached. out to us and they were interested in expanding their project to the Binance Smart Chain.

By launching DEC on CubFinance, we helped Splinterlands gain liquidity in their DEC-BUSD pool and started a partnership between Cub and Splinterlands.

Today, the DEC-BUSD Farm remains as a low multiplier pool but one that is still widely used on the platform.

Recently, Splinterlands launched their SPS token and it was a smashing success. They got it listed on Pancakeswap as a farm and this allowed us to create an SPS-BNB Kingdom.

Now, you can stake SPS-BNB on the https://cubdefi.com/kingdoms page. This vault will deploy your SPS-BNB into the Pancakeswap farm and autocompound your CAKE earnings back into the base SPS-BNB position.

This vault has become one of the highest TVL vaults on Cub Kingdoms. The SPS airdrop mechanism that Splinterlands used exploded the popularity of the game and the value of all the assets used in it.

Foreshadowing the future, we're using the same Airdrop mechanism that SPS deployed on top of DEC / card holders. The daily snapshot/airdrop smart contract.

This contract is being deployed for PolyCUB. All CUB holders will be airdropped POLYCUB tokens for 60 days with a daily snapshot/airdrop to CUB stakeholders. This worked extremely well for Splinterlands and we're excited to deploy the contract for ourselves with CUB & POLYCUB!

Another interesting piece from this article in March is this:

Other than this, the #1 question that came up was related to the Cub Roadmap. We have a lot of plans to adopt and build smart contracts that directly tie into Cub Finance (and LeoFinance) to bring new and exciting features to the Binance Smart Chain, Cub and our existing community.

The current Cub roadmap is very loosely defined which gives us plenty of flexibility to change things (i.e. changing the layered farming aspect by either removing it entirely or modifying the contract - more details soon).

It's really incredible to see how far we've come from this moment in time. Back then, our roadmap was very loosely defined on purpose. We knew that the DeFi industry was changing very rapidly and that we would need to adapt to the changing tides.

If you look at similar platforms that launched in early 2021, 90% of them are dead.

CUB is far from dead. We've actually deployed an entirely new set of contracts over the course of 2021. We called this update "Kingdoms" and it was an incredibly important moment for the CubFinance DeFi stack.

CUB is the base layer of the DeFi stack that we're building and it's important to share our vision of what kind of contracts we plan to adopt, modify and build to bring continual value to the Cub / LEO ecosystem.

Underappreciated is the idea of CUB being the base layer of our DeFi stack. For the past 6 months, we've been deploying some radically important contracts and preparing them for the CUB DeFi stack.

CUB lives at the base layer of everything we're doing in DeFi and to be completely honest with you, this is just the beginning. The launch of CubFinance showed that we could venture outside of the social token layer and build something in a broader marketplace that was desirable.

Then we iterated on top of that idea. We survived the "DeFi Winter" that killed nearly every other farming platform that was like CubFinance. We survived this with two key components:

Our diamond-pawed Community
Our development focus: the deployment of Kingdoms which quickly differentiated Cub from all other platforms that never iterated any change as radical as we did

March 18th, 2021 CUB Listed on CoinMarketCap, $600k in Daily Volume, LeoBridge Update and Code Audits

CUB was listed on Coin Market Cap and we crossed $600k in daily volume for the first time ever.

This time period for CUB was absolutely insane. The initial launch of any DeFi platform like this is always crazy at the beginning. PolyCUB will be identical in our opinion. Absolutely bananas at the launch as people pile in, attention reaches all-time highs and the tokenomics squeeze takes hold.

We're expecting POLYCUB's launch to be utterly jaw dropping, just as CUB was.

The key, as I mentioned above, is to sustain that attention and have the mechanisms, tools and team in place to handle that rapid growth and influx of new users.

We were not prepared for what happened to CUB and LeoFinance. We didn't have the tools, people or mechanisms in place to handle such a large influx of users and traffic.

This caused all sorts of issues. Sites crashing, bots exploding, servers overloading...

On the outside, the price was doing great so everyone was happy. Internally, we were all losing our shit over how crazy things had gotten and how our applications were blowing up in our faces. We were simply not ready for what happened and this caused us to go back to the drawing board and start establishing our protocols to become a much more organized organization.

Today, LeoFinance has 3x as many team members and dozens of servers with backup servers ready to deploy when the production servers aren't serving to capacity.

We've taken our sweet time getting ready for POLYCUB and I am truly glad that we did. Our goal is not like other platforms. We're not here for the quick, in-and-out pump and dump.

We're here to fulfill our mission:

Expand the width and depth of the LeoFinance Web3 community.

In order to fulfill this mission, we need to capture that initial hype that CUB got and that POLYCUB is about to get. We need to be able to properly handle that growth and serve the new community members who get onboarded so that we don't alienate anyone with long support times, bots that don't work and other mechanism failures.

March 24th, 2021 CUB Block Reward Halvening, Upcoming Features and Our Mission for Sustainable DeFi

March 24th marked the CUB Block Reward Halvening. For the first initial weeks of CubFinance, CUB rewards were extremely high. They tapered off each week after the launch as we moved toward more sustainable DeFi yields.

At the same time, we also were testing and working extremely hard on LeoBridge.

LeoBridge was and still is one of the main paths forward for the LEO token. The future is LeoBridge and multi-chain interoperability.

LEO has a really unique economy where our community can use the token to have a voice on the Hive blockchain and https://leofinance.io. Then, you can wrap tokens to Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain and participate in various forms of DeFi smart contracts with wLEO or bLEO.

When PolyCUB launches, pLEO will launch as well. Extending LEO to yet another blockchain and even more use cases.

With LeoBridge, we built a smart contract token bridge. Something that was extremely challenging but we deployed it nonetheless.

At the time of this post, we were nearly done with the bridge. It took much longer than anticipated and required a lot of dev hours to get done.

The high ETH gas fees has made LeoBridge unfeasible for the most part. Nobody wants to pay $200 to approve and swap assets from Ethereum to Binance Smart Chain.

With that in mind, LeoBridge is making a major comeback in 2022. We still believe that LeoBridge is one of the most important projects we've built as it will bring black hole theory right to the LEO token.

You'll hear many say that LEO is a $10 token hidden behind a radically miss-priced market. While it's impossible to predict the future and the price of any asset, we do believe that LeoBridge is a mechanism ahead of its time for a web3 community like ours.

The LeoBridge protocol is getting a major makeover in 2022 when PolyCUB launches. It will feature BSC->Polygon and Polygon->BSC transfers and with no ETH gas fees involved, the fee to move across these blockchains will be extremely low.

We're also deploying a mechanism for PoL (protcol owned lqiuidity) behind LeoBridge. This will allow swap fees to deepen the pools on each side of the LeoBridge.

Pool depth is extremely important for making LeoBridge viable. The deeper the pools, the larger the potential volume for cross-chain swaps.

As volume increases for cross-chain swaps, the pools deepen even further through swap fees (higher yield for community members to deploy LEO capital into the pools) and through LeoBridge fees which deepen the PoL side of the pools. Liquidity black hole theory for the LEO token is real and it will have a major impact on the value and use case of LEO in 2022.

LeoBridge is the first in a long-line of DeFi developments on top of the Cub Finance base layer. If you thought that Cub Finance was just a simple yield app and would remain that way for the long-term, then you thought wrong (looking at you BSC apes).

Many other platforms make promises but they're also run for purposes that are very different than Cub.

DeFi composability and interoperability is something that we're very focused on. We see a lot of projects and use cases out there that lack ease of use. With Cub, we're both building our own contracts from scratch (i.e. LeoBridge) and adopting the contracts of successful platforms to expand the use cases built on Cub (i.e. Yearn Vaults and Curve staking).

We're bringing all of the most valuable DeFi use cases into the LeoFinance / Cub Finance ecosystem directly to expand both the depth and width of our community. It brings immense layers of value to the existing Leo user base and also attracts new potential users into our ecosystem at the same time.

It's amazing to re-read many of the things we said back in early 2021 about CubFinance. We've managed to deploy around 2 dozen smart contracts and many more features for the Cub and Leo ecosystem.

With PolyCUB, you're going to see the past 6-8 months of blood, sweat and tears that we spent deep in development mode around the mission outlined above.

DeFi is going to be one of the most important sectors of the entire crypto space - if it isn't already. There are major banks, investors and communities that are entirely focused on DeFi and it's material impact on the crypto landscape and broader financial markets.

LeoFinance is in a mode of continual expansion and adaptation. Our community is centered around crypto and finance which makes us perfectly positioned to adopt DeFi protocols and collaborate with various DeFi projects.

Cub Finance give us the base layer and distribution we needed to launch more DeFi applications and what we have planned for the coming weeks and months in terms of new contracts for Cub is pretty incredible. First, we'll launch LeoBridge and then we'll start diving into the Cub Kingdoms update.

March 26th, 2021 UI Refresh, LeoBridge, Kingdoms Release and Major Farms/Dens Update

What an incredible time of development for the LeoFinance ecosystem... we were working so hard on deploying new features while plugging the holes of our existing apps.

In March, we reached a level of growth that was a complete shock to the team and our community. Our apps were struggling to keep up and so were we.

Despite this, we continued to charge forward... working as hard as we could to develop new features while servicing ones that were consistently experiencing outages due to overuse.

The team started to expand as we relentlessly went out looking for new talent to keep up with the growth. Delays happened and many saw the initial struggle for us to keep up with everything we were trying to achieve.

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LeoBridge is nearly ready. The backend is all deployed and our initial tests have gone smoothly. The final piece of the puzzle is putting together the Bridge UI (https://bridge.cubdefi.com) to handle decentralized cross-chain swaps.

We persevered through these challenges and managed to deliver in the end! As LeoFinance always does... just not on the timeline we prefer!

LeoBridge: A Vision of a Multi-Chain Future for the LEO Token Economy

LeoBridge is going to take centerstage in 2022 for the LeoFinance tokenized economy. We're excited to unveil what we've built in the tail end of 2021 as we prep for the release of pLEO and the LeoBridge extension to Polygon and Thorchain.

The quotes from this post still portray that same vision but from the early vantage point of the initial development and idea of LeoBridge. It's a fun re-read!

As LeoBridge scales, the value of LEO held in the wLEO / bLEO pools will need to increase. This is likely to come from a mix of price appreciation and the actual flow of LEO tokens to both pools.

The LeoFinance Team/Community appreciation for the Thorchain (RUNE) project seeps into many levels of the project. Deterministic Value is frequently discussed in regards to the future value of RUNE.

It's becoming increasingly clear that Deterministic Value is starting to play a larger and larger role in the value of LEO as well. First with wLEO-ETH as being base paired against the second largest cryptocurrency during a bull run has played out.

Kingdoms were in the very early stage of the design and development process. It's fun to see how mcuh that vision changed throughout the actual development of Kingdoms.

Cub Kingdoms are an exciting new vault contract we're building for the Cub Finance ecosystem. These vaults will resemble Yearn/Auto auto-compounding vault contracts.

May 8th, 2021 Introducing LeoBridge: Permissionless Cross-Chain Swaps ERC20 -> BEP20

Just look at the time jump from the last update to May 8th on this update to rollout LeoBridge.

It was in this April-May period that we started to see the initial wave of truly difficult development that is an interesting forecast of what was to come.

LeoFinance has a unique tokenomic structure. We have 3 tokens that represent LEO:

Native LEO (Hive Blockchain)

Wrapped LEO (Ethereum Blockchain)

BEP20 LEO (Binance Smart Chain)

Wraps can be performed instantaneously for minimal fees across these 3 versions of LEO. This allows our users to do some interesting things like participate in ETH-based applications and seamlessly unwrap assets onto the Hive blockchain and then rewrap LEO onto the Binance Smart Chain to participate in Cub Finance or other BSC dApps.

Utilizing this tri-token economy, LeoBridge allows users to swap any ERC20 token into any BEP20 token using smart contracts that interact with wLEO (ERC20) -> LEO (Hive) -> bLEO (BEP20).

Developing projects like Cub Finance, Kingdoms and LeoBridge is what showed us a whole new side of development struggles. This was truly a trying time for LeoFinance as we battled tooth and nail to get these features rolled out to the community.

LeoBridge was anticipated to take 2 weeks to develop. Instead, it was about 2 months.

Building applications and complex smart contracts turned out to be an entirely different ball game than building social applications on Hive.

We needed to learn new skills. Learn new ways to predict development timelines. Hire new talent. Bring in more levels of organization to run the entire project.

Facing these challenges is what showed us what needed to happen to secure the future of LeoFinance as an emerging Web3 project - we needed to SCALE.

While LeoBridge didn't get the usage we anticipated (due to the High ETH Gas Fees mentioned in a previous section), we do expect it to take centerstage in 2022 as a leading narrative in LeoFinance's push for the LEO token economy.

The multi-chain future has arrived and LeoFinance is the first Web3 community of its kind to tackle issues like this. It's going to be incredible to watch the new version of LeoBridge handle massive volume and growth in 2022 after the launch of PolyCUB!