Investor enthusiasm pushed LINK, a cryptocurrency released by blockchain company Chainlink Labs, to a nearly three-year high this week, in a sign of renewed market interest in decentralized finance, or DeFi.
LINK hit $30.68 on Friday before dipping slightly, the highest value it’s reached since 2022. The token, which has oscillated between $9 and $12 for the last few months, gained 11% this week, and has almost doubled in value since the beginning of the year.
Chainlink created the LINK token in 2017 as a way to reward people and entities that connect their real-world data to the Chainlink blockchain network. Since its inception, the token has accumulated a market cap of more than $17 million, as Chainlink’s ecosystem expands and DeFi becomes more popular.
LINK’s price movement has been particularly influenced this week by the activity of a few major traders, commonly known as whales. President-elect Donald Trump’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, for example, purchased 78,387 LINK tokens since Wednesday for a total of around $2.2 million, according to Arkham Intelligence, a crypto data analytics firm. The purchase is part of a larger move by the company to invest in DeFi tokens, including Ethereum and Aave. In November, World Liberty Financial announced that it would be partnering with Chainlink to “bring DeFi into the next stage of mass adoption,” the company posted on X.
Some of Chainlink’s more recent DeFi initiatives, as well as its moves to integrate more firmly within traditional finance institutions, have also driven market interest for its token.
On Wednesday, the company announced a new protocol that allows different blockchains to interact with each other more easily. It launched on the Ronin network, an Ethereum-based blockchain built for gaming, with the goal of helping to facilitate transactions between Ethereum, Ronin and Coinbase’s Base blockchain.
Chainlink also recently partnered with Emirates NBD, one of the largest banks in the UAE, as well as Coinbase’s Project Diamond, to advance adoption of digital assets among traditional financial, or TradFi, institutions. In another TradFi move, Chainlink has been working with the worldwide bank messaging system SWIFT to build on that existing infrastructure so that it can better facilitate transactions between blockchains.
“Just like Chainlink became the standard for powering DeFi, there is now very active integration work and adoption of Chainlink in the TradFi/Capital markets,” Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov wrote on X on Dec. 6.
