With U.S. financial markets at a halt for Memorial Day, the long holiday weekend marks the start of a relatively quiet week for most crypto markets, but one digital asset is booming: Chainlink (LINK).
LINK, the 14th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, was the best-performing cryptocurrency among the top 40 on Monday. According to data from CoinGecko, LINK has risen by more than 10% over the past day and is currently trading at $18.75.
LINK is the native token of Chainlink, an oracle project built on Ethereum designed to securely pass information on, off, and between blockchains.
The surge is likely a result of bullishness among LINK holders and supporters following the news that Chainlink will be co-launching with international payments platform SWIFT at the ConsenSys conference in Austin, Texas this week.
The collaboration, which first came to fruition last fall, is something Chainlink says proves “existing infrastructure can blend with the new world of blockchain.”
Meanwhile, Chainlink Project co-founder Sergey Nazarov also expressed broader optimism for Ethereum and all digital assets over the weekend following the historic approval of an Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF), saying that “this is really just the beginning.”
“Just as many systems and protocols will list Bitcoin and ETH first and then eventually list a number of other tokens, that's exactly the trajectory we're on,” he said. “It's a very clear indication of a trend where not just Bitcoin, but not just ETH, but many other tokens around the world will eventually get their own ETFs and allow the larger global capital market to interact with those financial instruments.”
Chainlink has been on a roll recently, yesterday touting the network's progress across nine different blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base.
Earlier this month, DTCC, the largest clearing and settlement house in the United States, announced that it had used Chainlink's cross-chain interoperability protocol as part of a tokenization pilot with Wall Street giants JP Morgan and BNY Mellon. The pilot, called Smart NAV, allowed the Wall Street firms to make mutual fund data available on the public network.
Finally, crypto investment firm 21Shares today featured Chainlink in its latest weekly research newsletter, stating that the company is “revolutionizing the tokenization space” and crediting it with enabling “over $10 trillion in transactions to over 2,000 projects across 22 separate networks.”
However, despite renewed interest in the Chainlink protocol, LINK still has a long way to go, with a rise of over 64% needed to reach its 2021 all-time high of $52.70.
Editor: Ryan Ozawa.
