As a leader in the field of oracles, Chainlink (LINK) has become an indispensable middleware in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. This article will conduct an in-depth analysis of its financial situation and recent developments.
1. Financial situation
Basic information: According to the latest data, LINK ranks 19th in market value, with a market value of approximately US$4.1 billion. Its total supply is 1 billion, and the current circulating supply is 560 million, with a circulation rate of approximately 56%. In the past 24 hours, LINK’s spot trading volume was $220 million. It is worth noting that LINK reached an all-time high price of $52 in the 2021 bull market, but fell to $7 in May 2022, and then maintained a volatile state. The lowest price fell to around $5 in 2023, and the highest price was reached several times. Tested $9.5 but failed to break above. Currently, LINK’s price is $7.38, down 86% from its all-time high.
Chip distribution
LINK's total token supply is 1 billion, of which 35% are sold through the initial coin offering (ICO), 30% is allocated to the parent company SmartContract for development, and 35% is used to incentivize node operators. The main uses of LINK include paying node operators to obtain data for smart contracts, as well as the collateral made by node operators at the request of contract creators. Therefore, LINK does not have the governance rights of the project.
According to historical data, LINK’s token release shows certain regularity. There will be relatively intensive token releases from July to August 2019, March to November 2021, and July to August 2022, with the number released per week ranging from hundreds of thousands to 1.5 million. There will be large-amount releases in August, November 2022 and March, June and September 2023, with each release amount ranging from 10 million to 20 million. Since August 2019, a total of approximately 84 million tokens have been released. Based on an average price of US$7, the market value is approximately US$590 million.
Position status: According to Nansen data, multiple Non-circulating supply marked wallets hold approximately 44% of the tokens in total. In the past 30 days, a total of 17 million tokens have flowed out of these wallets, while LINK’s pledge address holds 25.47 million tokens, accounting for only 2.55%. On the exchange side, Binance Wallet holds more than 6% of LINK. In the last 30 days, wallet 0XF97 has seen an inflow of 15.5 million LINK, while wallet 0X5A5 has seen an outflow of 8.5 million LINK.
2. Contract data
According to data from Coinglass, LINK’s contract holdings are $213 million, and its 24-hour trading volume is $629 million. The contract trading volume is about three times the spot trading volume. Compared with LINK's overall market value, the shareholding ratio of contracts is not high, about 5%. Judging from the contract data, after August 18, the price of LINK fluctuated between US$5.8 and US$6.5. On September 18, the position increased significantly, rising by more than 50% in a single day, and the price broke through the bottom range. Although positions have been corrected, the overall trend is still growing.
During the price increase, the ratio of long-short positions dropped from 2.5 to 0.89, showing that more people are short, which means that the average value of long accounts is higher than that of short accounts, and accounts with high values are more willing to be bullish on LINK. More intense. However, when the price rose to $7, the long-short ratio of large investors' positions also declined, from 1.23 to 1.09, indicating that the long-term willingness of large investors to hold funds has decreased.
3. Fundamentals and recent developments
Business data: In the field of general oracles, Chainlink has demonstrated overwhelming market advantages and formed high market barriers. According to the latest data, Chainlink, Chronicle Labs and WINLink together account for more than 90% of the entire oracle market. Although Chronicle Labs and WINLink also have larger market shares, their influence is far less than that of Chainlink.
Currently, there are more than 1,700 projects in Chainlink’s ecosystem, including 704 DeFi projects, 525 NFT projects, and 288 Gaming projects. Most well-known projects are covered, further strengthening Chainlink’s market position.
product architecture
Chainlink's decentralized oracle networks (DONs) are composed of multiple Chainlink nodes, ensuring the security, reliability and anti-tampering capabilities of data, reducing the risk of single points of failure and making data manipulation more difficult. Chainlink's node operators mainly include DevOps nodes, enterprise nodes and community nodes. DevOps nodes specialize in running blockchain infrastructure, enterprise nodes run back-end infrastructure for the traditional Web2 economy, and community nodes come from the Chainlink community.
in conclusion
As the leader in the oracle market, Chainlink (LINK) shows good development prospects with its strong market position and extensive application ecosystem. Despite recent price fluctuations, LINK still has high investment value from an overall financial and fundamental perspective. In the future, with the continuous development of DeFi and blockchain technology, Chainlink is expected to continue to lead the market trend and provide better services to its users.