Imagine a world where you would not have to wait for a bank to approve your transaction, or a notary would not have to approve your document to be valid. This is what Smart Contracts do. Smart Contracts are programs that replace intermediaries and do the heavy lifting that humans would do instead. Smart Contracts are pieces of code executed when certain conditions are met.
This is where the Chainlink project comes into place. For Smart Contracts to work, they need knowledge or data from the real world, which Chainlink provides. Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that provides the data to various blockchains. It does that by purchasing the data from multiple data providers and then streaming it to blockchains where Smart Contracts can pick up the data and use them.
Chainlink is one of the rare platforms that does not provide users with technologies to build out applications. Instead, it wants to give them access to more real-world information and data to scale further and expand their applications.
Link token is used as a currency for paying Chainlink network operators for retrieving and preparing off-chain data and performing computations.
At the time of writing (May 16th, 2022), LINK’s price is $7.35. The current Market Cap ranking is #25, with a market cap of $3.4B.
LINK had an excellent first half of the previous year when it hit an all-time high price of $52 in April. That is over 4x price increase over its price of $12 at the start of the year. Since then, LINK has failed to get back near its all-time high price, and now in 2022, market correction has been keeping prices under $10 for some time.
Since its inception, LINK has averaged a 180% growth.
Chainlink held a presale and a sale of tokens in September of 2017.
The total supply of LINK tokens is 1 billion. Currently, there are 467,009,549 tokens in circulation.
LINK is one of the most important sources of truth and information for many Smart Contracts out there. It also has a high supply available for purchase.
The primary way people buy their LINK is through centralized exchanges because they offer the ability to purchase them with credit\debit cards, which most people prefer.
Although significantly more complicated, the second way is through decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. Decentralized exchanges usually require users to already have some cryptocurrencies in their wallets to buy other cryptos.
Finally, it can be purchased easily through a broker app such as our Veli App, where you can get your hands on some LINK with just a few taps on the screen.
The CEO of Chainlink is Sergey Nazarov, a Russian entrepreneur who co-founded Chainlink, SmartContract, CryptoMail, and Secure Asset Exchange.
The next big name on the list is Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. He is a strategic advisor for oracle services and network providers. Schmidt also leads Chainlink’s scaling strategy.
He is the man who was responsible for launching many of Google’s most famous products, such as Gmail, Chrome, and Adsense, and Chainlink is looking to replicate that massive scaling, according to Chainlink’s CEO.
The roadmap for 2022 mainly focuses on rolling out staking for LINK holders, incentivizing them to stake their crypto, secure the network, and get rewarded for it in return. According to the CEO, after years of development, they are finally happy with the security and scalability of the consensus mechanism.
Chainlink has gathered around a vast community of Web3 enthusiasts. They are present on every major social media platform, with Twitter having over 800K followers. They also attend and create regular live events and gatherings, and on top of that, they have an ambassador program for those who want to apply.
With its presale and initial coin offering, chainlink has raised over $32 million. Some of the Venture Capitalists that have invested in Chainlink are A195 Capital, Next Play Ventures, Sweat Equity Ventures, 8 Decimal Capital, and Block0.
Chainlink has not had any legal issues that are known to the public.
LINK is available as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Beside Ethereum network, LINK is also available on BNB, Solana, HECO and Fantom.
Chainlink’s biggest competitors are Band Protocol, and API3
Band Protocol is also a data oracle that provides data to Smart Contracts. It is built on the Cosmos blockchain, and unlike Chainlink, it does not have a limit on the number of tokens. It is also much slower and much less adopted than Chainlink.
API3 is also a project that provides data and information to Smart Contracts, but it does so using APIs that are integrated into applications instead of using oracles. It is also built on Ethereum like Chainlink, but it is much slower and less adopted than Chainlink.
Here is some additional information to further illustrate this competition.
Chainlink | Band Protocol | API3 | |
Platform | Ethereum | Cosmos | Ethereum |
Number of integrations | 1000+ | 195+ | 56+ |
Market cap | $6.7b | $139m | $264m |
Total number of wallet addresses | 790k | 40k+ | 16.2k |
Total number of daily active users | 1,740 | 300 | 358 |
Circulation supply | 46.70% | Not limited supply | Not limited supply |
Launch date | 2019 | 2019 | 2020 |
Average growth rate | \ | \ | \ |
As with any other asset class, there are risks involved when it comes to investing. Since there are many kinds of cryptocurrencies, risks can be grouped into two categories – general risks that apply when investing in cryptocurrencies and risks that only apply to specific assets.
We have prepared a guide that addresses general cryptocurrency investing risks and offers tips on how to mitigate them, while risks that only apply to specific assets are addressed directly in the coin guides such as this one.
Website: https://chain.link/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chainlink
Telegram: https://t.me/chainlinkofficial
Medium: https://medium.com/chainlink
Chainlink is solving a massive problem with data availability in the crypto and blockchain industry. Apart from that, it has the space for comfort ahead of its competitors in terms of adoption, the number of partnerships, and market cap. The project’s future lies in adopting blockchain technology, new partner onboarding, and overall market growth. It is also a project that follows the trend of the DeFi sector since it is a DeFi utility-oriented project. DeFi sector was trendy in early 2020 and early 2021 but has lost some buildup since then.
Another thing called selling pressure of LINK tokens was that the team was selling their tokens to finance the further growth of Chainlink. This has caused a price decay in the short term. We can only sit, wait, and see how the project’s path unfolds.
