The altcoin sector received a welcoming push in the early hours of January 18, as most of the currencies showed positive price changes and increased trading volumes. However, some altcoins performed better than others and one of the biggest gainers is Chainlink’s native token – LINK.
LINK’s price surge managed to pull the token from the $20 levels only to hit a new all-time high of $23,61, according to cryptobrowser.io. The move managed to put LINK among the best-performing crypto assets over the past week, recording over 50% price increase, when compared to January 11. Chainlink, however, is accompanied by other well-performing assets, such as Cardano (ADA) with a 34% weekly price increase, Polkadot (DOT), which doubled its price point in the seven-day span, while Bitcoin only managed to secure a 5% weekly price gains.
Source: CryptoBrowser.io
The move fueled the bullish optimism of the Chainlink community, with some users predicting LINK would reach a top-3 position until March 2021. However, in order to become among the three largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Chainlink has to increase its market cap by $15 billion. Moving forward is actually easier than it may seem, as the #8 cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is only $400,000 away. Currently, Chainlink occupies the ninth spot in the crypto rankings, with $8,77 billion in market capitalization.
Chainlink’s moves come amid another oracle service expansion with the addition of LTC/USD oracle, which collects and aggregates price data from multiple sources, providing a more accurate price readout for DeFi projects to use. Also, more and more DeFi projects are starting to rely on Chainlink for its oracle services, with projects like NULS, Opyn, Neutrino, Paxos, Warp Finance, Poolz, and SynLev adding data feeds through Chainlink just the past week alone.
Meanwhile, Twitter user The Crypto Oracle cited the DeFi sector and its growth as a major catalyst for the positive price movements of Chainlink.
“It’s truly one of the main engines to DeFi’s growth, and its network effect & data costs will be shared across projects & chains,” the user noted.
Furthermore, Chainlink also released a Chinese version of its website, which may be bringing in customers from East Asia onboard.
Chainlink’s price explosion, combined with projects like Cardano, Binance Coin, and Polkadot, intensified the rumors about another altcoin season kicking in. Furthermore, Binance is about to perform a BNB token burn, which would lead to an increased speculation and a scarcity effect – both leading to a price increase.