Chainlink (LINK) Flips Litecoin (LTC) As 7th Largest Crypto With New ATH and Network Growth

It’s been a great start of 2021 for the overall cryptocurrency market and particularly for oracle service provider Chainlink (LINK). While the overall crypto market remains calm, the LINK cryptocurrency has shot 15% today hitting a new all-time high of $24.34.

Interestingly, with a $9.5 billion market cap, the LINK cryptocurrency has become the seventh most-value cryptocurrency flipping Litecoin (LTC). Also, the year-to-date gains for LINK stand at more than 100%. Moreover, the LINK price rally is not just a wave but rather backed with strong fundamentals and on-chain metrics.

The Chainlink network has registered record growth with daily active addresses seeing a rapid increase. As per on-chain data provider Santiment, “5,301 new addresses created is 143% higher than its 2,189 three months ago”. Interestingly, the active addresses had nearly touch 10k five days back.

Also, as per last week’s “Holders distribution data,” the mid-tier addresses for Chainlink have been rapidly increasing in number. Independent crypto researcher Crypto Oracle notes that nearly 90% of blockchain applications require oracle to create value. Thus, the researcher cites major growth for Chainlink going ahead.

If we assume that upwards of 80-90% of blockchain applications need oracles to create value, and 80-90% of the applications on each blockchain network choose Chainlink oracles, it's not hard to envision #Chainlink becoming more valuable than any single blockchain.

— ⬡ The_Crypto_Oracle ⬡ (@Crypto___Oracle) January 22, 2021

Chainlink Attracts Institutional Players

The Chainlink network and its LINK cryptocurrency seem to be attracting institutional interest. As CoinGape reported earlier today, Grayscale looking to add the LINK Trust to its basket of crypto products.

Already big tech giants like Google have started using Chainlink oracles to move the off-chain data to different blockchain networks. Also as the DeFi market continues to expand rapidly, Chainlink is seeing heavy demand among different decentralized applications. The recent blogpost mentions:

“As the market-leading decentralized oracle solution, Chainlink is meeting this growing demand by continually expanding the types of data available to smart contracts across all the leading blockchains, including market data, gaming data, insurance data, proof of reserves, and a wide range of additional datasets and computations”.

Chainlink applications and usage are like to grow further in the future looking at the current market developments. We expect the LINK cryptocurrency to gain more strength in the coming times. To understand any immediate price movements, take a look at our recent LINK technical analysis.