Markets
Chainlink Explodes Amid Swift Payments Update and Ethereum ETF Rush
With US financial markets on pause for Memorial Day, the long holiday weekend meant a relatively quiet start to the week for most cryptocurrency markets, but one digital asset is booming: Chain shirt (CONNECTION).
LINK, the 14th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is Monday’s best performer among the top 40 coins. CoinGecko data proves it increased more than 10% over the past day and is now trading for $18.75.
LINK is the native token of Chainlink, an Ethereum-based oracle project designed to securely get information on and off a blockchain and between chains.
The surge is likely a result of LINK holders and supporters feeling optimistic following news that Chainlink would be co-presenting with international payments platform Swift at this week’s Consensys conference in Austin, Texas.
The collaboration, which it bore its first fruits last autumnis one that Chainlink he said demonstrated that “existing infrastructures can merge with the new world of blockchains.”
Meanwhile, also the co-founder of the Chainlink project, Sergey Nazarov expressed broad optimism for Ethereum and all digital assets over the weekend, after the historical approval of Ethereum Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), stating that it is “really just the beginning.”
“Just like many systems and protocols initially list Bitcoin and ETH and then eventually list a multitude of other tokens, that’s really the trajectory we’re on,” he said. “It’s a sign of a very clear trend that not just Bitcoin, not just ETH, but many other tokens around the world will sooner or later end up getting their own ETFs, allowing the largest global capital markets to interact with that financial product. ”
Chainlink has been on a roll lately, yesterday touting the progress its network has made across nine different blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base.
Earlier this month, DTCC, the largest clearing and settlement center in the United States,announced which used Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol with Wall Street giants JP Morgan and BNY Mellon as part of a tokenization pilot project. That pilot project, called Smart NAV, allowed Wall Street institutions to make mutual fund data available on public networks.
Finally, cryptocurrency investment firm 21Shares today featured Chainlink in its latest weekly research newsletter, saying it is “revolutionizing the realm of tokenization” and crediting it with enabling “over $10 trillion in transactions across more than 2,000 projects on 22 separate networks”.
Despite the renewed interest in the Chainlink protocol, however, LINK still has a long way to go – growth of over 64% – before reaching its all-time 2021 all-time high of $52.70.
By Ryan Ozawa.