Ethereum
Chainlink Explodes Amid Swift Payments Update and Ethereum ETF Rush
With U.S. financial markets on hold for Memorial Day, the long holiday weekend meant a relatively quiet start to the week for most crypto markets, but one digital asset is booming: Chain link (LINK).
The 14th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, LINK is Monday’s best performer among the top 40 coins. Data from CoinGecko shows that he increased more than 10% over the past day and is now trading at $18.75.
LINK is the native token of Chainlink, an Oracle project built on Ethereum designed to get information in and out of a blockchain (and between chains) securely.
The increase is likely due to LINK holders and supporters feeling optimistic about the news that Chainlink will be co-featured with international payments platform Swift at this week’s Consensys conference in Austin, Texas.
The collaboration, which bore its first fruits last fallis the one that Chainlink said has proven that “existing infrastructures can merge with the new world of blockchains”.
Co-founder of the Chainlink project, Sergey Nazarov, also expressed broad optimism for Ethereum and all digital assets over the weekend, following the historical approval of Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs), saying this is “really just the beginning.”
“Just like many systems and protocols initially list Bitcoin and ETH and then end up listing a multitude of other tokens, that’s really the trajectory we’re on,” he said. “This is a sign of a very clear trend that not only Bitcoin, not only ETH, but many other tokens around the world will eventually have their own ETFs at some point, enabling the world’s largest capital markets to interact with this financial product.
Chainlink has been on a roll lately, yesterday touting its network’s progress on nine different blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base.
Earlier this month, DTCC—the largest settlement and clearing center in the United States—announcement that it used Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol with Wall Street giants JP Morgan and BNY Mellon as part of a tokenization pilot. This pilot project, called Smart NAV, allowed Wall Street institutions to make mutual fund data available on public networks.
Finally, crypto investment firm 21Shares today profiled Chainlink in its latest weekly research bulletin, claiming it is “revolutionizing the field of tokenization” and crediting it with enabling “more than 10,000 billion dollars in transactions to over 2,000 projects across 22 distinct networks.”
Despite the renewed interest in the Chainlink protocol, LINK still has a long way to go – up over 64% – before reaching its all-time high of $52.70 in 2021.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.