Unlinking Chainlink
In today's edition, Chainlink takes a detour and Helium sinks.
Welcome to The Daily Moon. It’s a brand new week. And Celsius is ready to pay back customers. But there’s a catch. The crypto lender will only repay those investors who didn’t opt for annual returns and had a wallet balance of more than $7,575.
It’s a new week. Today, we’ll talk about Chainlink’s decoupling from the bears, and why Helium’s crashing.
The markets were flat. Bitcoin stayed below $20,000 while Ethereum slipped below $1,550 levels. Nasdaq fell on a technology selloff. Back home, Sensex and Nifty faced volaility.
Image: Chainlink
Chainlink Has A Breakaway Moment
Chainlink was different from the crypto crowd from the very beginning. It launched in 2017 to build the foundation of a crypto economy. And now, the crypto asset has started to delink from the bear market.
The oracle-based crypto (via token LINK) is the most-held among the top 100 Ethereum whales. While LINK is down ~87% from its all-time high of $52.70, there is a lot more on the table.
For starters, Chainlink 2.0 is in the pipeline, which will offer spot audits and interest gains. The decentralised blockchain network will also get faster post the Merge since it is built on Ethereum. Now that whales are interested, something is up.
Source: Chainlink
What is Chainlink?
Decentralised applications operate within the blockchain, meaning that they don’t interact with the internet or the physical world. So if they require data from websites or public sources, it is tough to access. That is Chainlink’s use case.
It’s an oracle blockchain network that bridges the gap between smart contracts on the blockchain and real-world data.
Oracles are a medium for decentralised Web3 ecosystems to access existing data sources off-chain.
Chainlink is oracle crypto and the largest in terms of price and market cap.
Sergey Nazarov, the co-founder of Chainlink Labs, called it “the internet of the internet age”.
The price journey
At the time of launch in 2017, Chainlink traded at just over a cent in US currency. Once the mainnet was launched in 2019 to transfer data in and out of Ethereum smart contracts, LINK’s price surged further.
As crypto broke its ties with stock market movements, Chainlink prices moved up to $19 levels and later topped $52. However, it crashed after Tesla announced a halt in Bitcoin payments for car purchases. LINK was down to ~$15 levels.
This year was a mixed bag with the token seeing a slide from ~$29 levels in January to $5 in August. But the Terra crash did not make a dent in its trade.
CHAINLINK AT A GLANCE–2021
Source: Company
What’s on the bull radar?
Oracle tokens have a total market cap of $3.8 billion, of which Chainlink contributes $3.3 billion. There is added interest because close to 1,500 projects run on Chainlink, including DeFi, NFT, and gaming.
Chainlink plans a universe of connections between hundreds of blockchain networks. This will enable quicker smart contract execution between buyers and sellers.
Enterprises such as AccuWeather, Amazon Web Services, Associated Press, and Google Cloud use Chainlink to offer their services on the blockchain. Add-on solutions such as proof of reserve to validate crypto collateral. Proof of reserve verifies whether stablecoins and other crypto assets are fully backed by collateral.
That’s not all. The token staking rewards set to be introduced later this year could lead to a further price rally.
But it is not immune to criticism. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin said that while Chainlink as a solution is “great”, it lacks the process to penalise participants who provide incorrect data. Nazarov pointed to incentives for accurate data as a deterrent for bad actors.
With Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake, the full potential of Chainlink would only be unlocked further. Analysts expect double-digit growth for Chainlink, with predictions of even a 50% rally. The underdog crypto has its moment.
Not Kicked About HNT’s Move
Nobody is pleased with Helium’s shift to Solana. The crypto-based wireless network Helium wants to move away from its own blockchain to Solana. Helium’s HNT token fell 15% since the proposal was made public.
Why the shift?
Helium developers claim a Solana switch would make the network faster, stable, and agile. Its tokens will move to Solana as well.
The network offers crypto tokens as rewards to users for sharing their private internet with a wider public. Helium users could get more reward tokens after the move. But the market isn’t enthused because Solana is infamous for its network outages.
Mounting woes
This isn’t the only worry for Helium. In July, Lime and Salesforce denied being Helium clients. The network had to kick into damage-control mode to strengthen due diligence. All in all, the token has borne the brunt of bad decisions.
And that’s it for today. If this email was forwarded to you, please consider subscribing. It’s free. We’ll never show you an ad or charge you for this. We swear.
Who are we? There is a lot happening in our world. Everything has layers, and each layer has to be carefully peeled so you, the reader, know how the world of money is changing every day. That’s our promise. Help you unpeel the onions, which are the public markets in the US, India, and crypto, so that you know just a little more.