Link: 1/3 Status Update

A look at the trading status of the Chainlink token

New year, new report. The last couple weeks have been very good for Link holders. Let’s look at everything that happened in detail.

News

The December news finally arrived. Sergey wrote a lengthy Medium post and answered questions on Slack. The main takeaways were:

· An ‘initial simplified implementation’ of the mainnet will be released by the end of Q1. It’s a big milestone and Link’s price should see very strong upward action in the weeks prior to the release.

· ‘We have hired, and are continuing to hire developers’. This is nice, but why not mention how many and publish their names? On LinkedIn, only Sergey and Steve show up as SmartContract employees. In crypto, secret teams are not a good thing. Too many people have been burned by scams. While it’s clear that ChainLink isn’t one, the ambiguity regarding hires creates understandable doubts. The Github and Gitter are great, but more transparency is required in this area.

· They’re hiring a Director of Marketing and, while their focus is on attracting Enterprise clients, they do want to improve communication with the community. Despite what you might have heard, there’s been no mention of monthly posts or anything of the kind. We don’t know when the next communication will happen.

· ‘We believe that smart contracts, and blockchain-based networks are on track to overcome the total value transacted through the existing internet’. This exciting prospect would take years, but if it happens and SmartContract becomes the biggest company in the sector, you might be able to retire on your Link.

The whole article is worth a read, as it goes deep into the value proposition for SmartContract and ChainLink.

There’s also been plenty of external attention lately:

· Swift didn’t mention Link explicitly in their reports. Doing so would have made the price go up like crazy. Still, we know from Rory that SmartContract continues to work with Swift on bond payments.

· A redditor put together a useful list of ChainLink partnerships. People expressed doubts about the newest one, Origami, so I asked Rory about it.

· Newsletter Rowlingstone considers Link ‘a sleeping giant’.

· Playmate of the year Kennedy Summers bought some Link.

Price action

Link’s steady uptrend wasn’t affected by the lack of news regarding partnerships. It’s springtime for alts and everything’s mooned. New money is flowing into alts every day. Look at Ripple. Look at Verge doing 20x on a freaking tweet from McAfee. And yesterday, when alts dipped and lost up to 40%, the dip was bought back incredibly fast.

Everyone that hoped to get rich with Bitcoin has moved to buying the top 25 alts. As a result, veteran traders looking for the next 10x have moved to smaller cap alts. New money is flowing from Coinbase to Binance and old money is flowing from Binance to KuCoin.

All in all, Link is showing signs of strength and a very solid uptrend. The only issue is the diminishing volume the last two weeks. That could be a problem, but it’s all a question of patience: guessing what the price action in the next few weeks will be like is almost impossible, especially if Bitcoin tests $20,000 again, as it well might. What’s almost certain is that the run-up to the mainnet launch will see Link’s price increase like crazy. This might begin happening now and never stop (unlikely) or we might see a big dip followed by a sudden moon in the last couple weeks of March.

There’s another very positive development to consider: Price is showing solid price action on no partnership news. An announcement from a big company would see the price explode.

Wallets and Exchanges and the Top 100

ChainLink is just off the top 100 and will be for the foreseeable future. There’s just too many new ICOs that will go straight into the top 100. Straight into the top 30, in some cases. It might seem crazy that being in the top 100 requires a $248M market cap, but that might grow up to be $500M or even a Billion in a matter of months.

No news on Poloniex or new exchanges. I guess we’ll just have to stay on Binance for the time being.

The wallets have been moving.After the announcement, some of the top 50 wallets sent part of their tokens to Binance. I guess they wanted to reduce risk and move money to other cryptos with better mooning prospects and upcoming news. Only one of them has gotten rid of all their Link, though.

On the other hand, there are two new wallets in the top 50. One with 1,500,000 tokens from Binance (I imagine he’d been accumulating for a long time) and another with a million.

(Keep in mind it’s often impossible to know whether these wallets belong to individual investors or exchanges).

There are now 14,234 wallets. That’s a 23% increase in three weeks. Another sign that interest in Link is growing.

That’s all. I’ll provide another update whenever there are relevant news.

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