First published 29 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 so the burn tally is treated as a company page, not as a law of the token. UNUS SED LEO is a utility token issued for the iFinex companies, the group that runs Bitfinex. LEO is the ticker. The Latin name is a motto, not a second asset. You can hold the token in a wallet. The fee discount, the product it is actually for, lives inside a Bitfinex account.
What is BNB? is the other large exchange token, the one that grew its own chain. What is Tether (USDT)? is the dollar token from the same corporate family. LEO is neither of those. New York’s Tether order is about a balance sheet, not a peg algorithm is the 2019 case sitting beside this sale.
The sale
Unus Sed Leo Limited, a British Virgin Islands company formed to issue the token, sold it privately in May 2019 at one USDT per LEO. The offering was sized up to one billion tokens. One billion is the number that was created. The tokens were issued on two chains, Ethereum and EOS. They are different entries that the company treats as the same liability. An Ethereum address will not receive the EOS token. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
The white paper said the proceeds could be used for the business, including paying down obligations. It also promised a buyback. On a schedule the company has restated more than once, iFinex said it would spend at least 27 percent of its consolidated gross revenue buying LEO on the market and burning it, until the tokens in commercial circulation are gone. Tokens used to pay fees can count toward that. The white paper also pointed recovered funds, from the Crypto Capital episode and from the earlier Bitfinex hack, at further buybacks. A promise in a token paper is a company sentence. It is not a protocol rule a stranger can enforce by running a node.
What the burn page is, and what a market cap is not
Bitfinex publishes a running tally of tokens burned. That page is the supply story. A market-cap widget that still multiplies a price by the original billion is using a supply the burn was meant to shrink. Even a widget that uses the smaller number is still a price times a supply. If a large share of the trading is on the exchange that issued the token, the figure is not a statement that you could sell that much into a crowd of strangers. This page will not estimate how much.
Fee discounts, lending products, and withdrawal perks are Bitfinex account rules. They apply where the company says they apply, in the countries where Bitfinex offers them. They do not travel with LEO you withdrew, except where the terms say a holding elsewhere still counts. An exchange balance is an IOU, not a wallet. Withdrawing the token leaves the discount schedule behind and puts you on a chain, with keys and a network choice.
LEO is not Tether, and it is not Bitfinex stock. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, burn, or hold it.
