Whenever people are discussing promising cryptocurrencies these days, Chainlink (LINK) is always mentioned. Launched in 2017, the project is considered quite young for the industry, and judging by the general mood of the crypto community, many are confident in the fairly bright prospects for this asset.
Let’s discuss what link crypto is and what holders should expect from it.
What is Chainlink (LINK)?
Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network introduced in mid-2017. The network was created by a team of developers specializing in optimizing smart contracts: Sergey Nazarov, Steve Ellis, Ari Jewels, and others.
LINK is a native cryptocurrency issued on the Ethereum blockchain. It has a limited emission of 1 billion tokens and is used to pay for the work of network operators.
According to the creators, the main goal of the network is to organize a secure and decentralized interaction between the blockchain and the traditional market. The goal of the network is achieved by verifying the data taken from external sources for smart contracts in the blockchain.
Chainlink services turned out to be in demand not only in crypto markets, but also among banking organizations that began to implement advanced blockchain technologies in their work.
What makes Chainlink so unique?
The Chainlink network provides smart contracts with a reliable way to access data and services outside the network. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts that contain the terms of agreement between the seller and the buyer. At the same time, smart contracts are limited to data in the network itself.
In turn, Chainlink is designed to provide smart contracts with the ability to access external data, WEB-API, and payment systems. This was implemented using the Chainlink oracle network, which acts as an intermediary between the blockchain and smart contracts.
It is important to note that initially oracles were responsible for the delivery of external data for the execution of a smart contract. They were not the most reliable or secure because they only used one data source and gave full control to the creator.
Chainlink improved the technology and introduced decentralized oracles. Their distinguishing feature is the lack of a single source of information and increased resistance to manipulation. To obtain the most reliable information, a smart contract in the Chainlink network requests data from several oracles at once.
Everything works according to a fairly simple principle: the oracle network combines many nodes, the operators of which can use several oracles. At the same time, each oracle can have several data sources.
It is important to mention that Chainlink does not have its own network. The nodes operate on the served blockchains. At the same time, the list of supported blockchains is expanding.
Chainlink was originally introduced on Ethereum, but now the Solana network and networks compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (BNB Chain, Fantom, Polygon, Avalanche, etc) are also supported.
According to whalestats, LINK is the most popular currency to hold by the major whales of Ethereum. This information is obtained after analyzing the wallet information of the 5000 largest Ethereum whales.
At the time of this writing, Chainlink is the largest provider of decentralized oracles. A number of experts believe that the economic value of Chainlink in the industry is achieved by serving a number of crypto projects and the demand for the proposed technology both in decentralized finance and among non-blockchain organizations.
The price of Chainlink (LINK)
At the time of writing, the value of the LINK is $7.39 with a daily trading volume of $430,637,371. According to the CoinMarketCap rating, LINK is ranked 20th with a market capitalization of $3,822,222,396. Chainlink’s all-time high price since its launch is $52.88.
Chainlink (LINK) price, like with other cryptocurrencies, was affected by the general downtrend in the market. The asset started 2022 with a noticeable growth to $27.92, but by the end of spring 2022 it was at the level of about $7.
At the same time, the bear market did not prevent developers from working on the Chainlink ecosystem and announcing new partnerships.
For example, in September 2022, Chainlink announced a partnership with the SWIFT interbank information transfer and payment system. The partners have begun work on a mechanism that will allow traditional financial institutions to transact with each other using the Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol, or CCIP.
In December, Chainlink announced the launch of staking to improve the security of the network, ensure the involvement of community, etc. The staking works like a pool that maintains an ETH/USD data feed on the Ethereum mainnet. Stakers are rewarded for helping to secure data by participating in a decentralized notification system.
Initially, the staking pool will be limited to 25 million LINK, and over time, the number of tokens in the pool will be increased to 75 million. At this stage, staking is available to community members who meet the criteria established by the projects.
In the spring of 2023, Chainlink developers announced a new service that will help to connect websites to smart contracts via a dedicated API connection. A service called Chainlink Functions will allow you to adapt the infrastructure of websites to decentralized applications. At the moment, it is available on the Sepolia (for Ethereum) and Mumbai (for Polygon) testnets.
As you can see, Chainlink (LINK) is an extraordinary project. It is constantly developing, and the Chainlink price still has a chance to please its investors.