Link: 10/24 Status Update

A daily look at the trading status of the Chainlink token

There’s a lot to discuss today, so I will forgo this update’s usual structure and go straight for yesterday’s Binance drama.

4chan Bank Run

As most of you know, yesterday the Chainlink community exploded, or at least te 4chan part of it did. Holders have felt frustrated for days with the token being available on a single big exchange, Binance. There’s been lots of talk about price manipulation by bots. Although there is no proof, just taking a look for 5 minutes straight at the buy and sell walls makes the rumors very plausible.

So yes, the community wants the token to be traded on more big exchanges. With good reason.

Yesterday morning, 4chan users decided that enough was enough and that emptying the Binance wallet of its Link tokens would send a message, not only to the exchange, but also to the Chainlink team, that’s been accused of not doing enough to get the token listed somewhere else. While the lack of news from the team can be frustrating, I applaud their no-hype communication policy. It’s professional. Quite a change from other companies in this space.

The Binance wallet had 2M tokens left. In just a few hours, /biz/ users emptied it out by moving their tokens to their wallets. Then, withdrawals were put on pause as the wallet just didn’t have enough Link. Meanwhile, a lot of crazy rumors spread on the forum: Binance uses your tokens to trade, Binance won’t refund the rest of us, this is a new Mt. Gox. The funniest part was seeing many of the threads evolve into pretty sound advice on how to store your crypto safely.

In any case, it turned out that that Binance wallet was just its hot withdrawal wallet. Binance had other wallets with Link reserves and moved 20M tokens to the emptied one in just a matter of hours. Withdrawals resumed and the campaign ended. Most 4chan users seemed to feel satisfied that they’d voiced their frustration. Others claimed that the lack of impact on trading prices confirmed that most of the Link trading on Binance is done by bots. It’s true that, for a short while, Link traded 20% higher on Etherdelta while Binance remain unperturbed. Still, Binance had 91.96% of the total Link volume, even more than the previous day. And the total volume traded was indeed affected by the protest, decreasing to $2.9 Million from $4 Million the day before. People stopped trading.

About 266 people took part in the protest. How do we know this? Well, wallets have been growing at a daily 1.50% for the last week, but they grew 3.57% yesterday, to a total of 12,080. That’s 266 unexpected new wallets.

The Chainlink team has stated that they have no opinion on this, as it only had to do with a third party. I like their prudence, but I’d be surprised if this doesn’t make them prioritize getting on new exchanges.

All in all, here’s the biggest lesson: Keeping your money in exchanges is a bad idea unless you’re actively trading. Imagine a run a thousand times bigger and your exchange stopping withdrawals. Imagine that your favorite exchange gets hacked.

Educate yourself about crypto security and get a hardware wallet.

Now on to our usual programming…

Link and the top 100

Link is trading at $0.2703. The 15.62% increase is nice, but not that amazing when you consider the sure in alt prices yesterday evening after the Bitcoin Gold fork, which happened sooner than expected.

Link is the 66th coin in market cap and the 39th in trading volume. It’s been the 32nd best performing coin in the last 24 hours. Not that great, considering the money coming into alts and how cheap the token is at the moment.

Link is now the top 67th coin in market capitalization at $81M. Volume has diminished sharply to $2.4M from $5.8M in just one day and it’s become the 36th most traded coin.

Price action

The rally I predicted yesterday by looking at the 12 and 1 hour charts happened. Today, the situation looks even better in the 12h and daily charts. Hopefully, the price will increase, but let’s keep in mind the longer term downtrend is still in force. If you’re holding, ignore the daily changes and wait for good news from the team.

Whales

The main change has been Binance moving 20M tokens from several of its cold wallets into the hot withdrawals wallet. The other wallets where huge too, and Binance has even more. Binance CEO CZ explained on Telegram that the hot wallet had 5% of the LINK reserves only. That would mean they have at least 40M tokens.

With so many of the top 50 wallets belonging to Binance, I’m thinking that watching them one by one for daily changes doesn’t have any value. They belong to an exchange, not to investors. From now on, I’ll pay more attention to the percentage owned by the top 50, 100, or 250 wallets as a whole. I’ll also continue to monitor withdrawals from the Binance and Etherdelta wallets.

On that note, the top 50 hold 75.24% of the tokens. The top 100 hold 78.24%. More or less the same as yesterday.

News

Another day, another rumor spreading like wildfire. Today, it’s that Chainlink has promised an update before the end of the month. Not true. Rory was asked whether the company would have any updates by the end of October. Rory’s concise answer? ‘I believe we will’. People, how on Earth is that confirmation of upcoming news? And keep in mind that, even if they release any news, they could be a rehash of things we already know. ‘We’re hiring developers and marketing people and look forward to the continued support of the community’. How’s that for news? How’s that for self-inflicted disappointment among those building hype?

That’s all for today. Hopefully, tomorrow’s update will be shorter.

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