While major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Litecoin have seen significant drops in value and have taken most of the press attention, one smaller token Chainlink has actually doubled in value in recent times.
The cryptocurrency market saw its highest recorded values for the year in the month of June 2019 but since then, has struggled to maintain this momentum. Following reports of Binance’s Shanghai office being closed down by the authorities which were later debunked, the Bitcoin price fell below $7,200 per token (at the time of writing it is trading at $7,132.17) and several altcoins also saw a decline. Ethereum and Bitcoin Chas lost more than 12% over the last 24 hours, Litecoin – more than 10%, and XRP – more than 5%.
While this year has seen Bitcoin and other cryptos recover from the significant slump they faced a year ago, they have yet to have a huge bull run comparable to the prices that the industry saw in 2017 and for now, tokens are struggling to an extent.
Curious Case of Chainlink
The token, in this case, is Chainlink and it has gone from $1 per token to $2.55 since June and this comes after the company behind it revealed a number of strategic partnerships as well as use cases for their technology. Chainlink began 2019 by trading at $.25 per token and eventually saw a height of $4 before falling to its current level of $2.55 per token.
According to CoinMarketCap, the five biggest coins by market capitalization are Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Tether, Bitcoin Cash. If we exclude the USDT stablecoin from this list, the 5th largest crypto is Litecoin. And Chainlinks is currently sitting at the 16th position on the list. Chainlink is an Ethereum-based token that allows connection to external platforms via the Chainlink decentralized Oracle network.
Some of the recent growth in Chainlink can be put down to their newest efforts to expand into China just as the Chinese president stated that they are encouraging blockchain development. In April 2019, the hired a Chinese community manager and should they be able to get a strong footing within the country, they could be more growth to come. The firm has also seen some high-profile collaborations as they teamed up with Binance recently to develop some decentralized financial products such as derivatives. They also teamed up with Google and Oracle earlier this year to improve on legacy payment systems and databases using blockchain technology.
All this and more has led to Chainlink seeing much more attention from within the crypto community.
“I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been watching chainlink incredibly closely,” Eric Thies, a cryptocurrency analyst said. “I noticed a similar structure to Ethereum’s price behavior in 2016 or, dare I say, bitcoin between 2011 and 2012. I wouldn’t be surprised to see link hovering around $10 and making it to the top 10 cryptocurrencies in CoinMarketCap by mid-2020.”
Anna Lee is a crypto journalist who has been covering crypto-related news since 2018 and whose work has appeared in the Huffington Post and the Los Angles Free press.
