Link: 10/22 Status Update

A daily look at the trading status of the Chainlink token

Today, Link is 25% up, a welcome change from the last few days. Still, the downtrend isn’t actually reversed yet, and with so many tokens leaving the exchanges, price manipulation and sudden price changes remain a very serious concern.

Let’s look at the data.

Link and the top 100

Link’s the 63rd token in market capitalization and remains the 27th in trading volume. Daily volume was $4.8M, a million less than yesterday but good for a Saturday. The token’s very much alive when it comes to daytrading.

Top wallets

No big changes in the top 50. A whale withdrew 137,000 tokens from Binance. The top 50 hold 74.96% of the tokens. The top 100 hold 78,20%. These numbers are pretty much unchanged since yesterday, specially if you discount the Binance and Etherdelta wallets getting smaller.

Exchanges

Etherdelta (6.80M tokens) has overtaken Binance (5.27M) in tokens held. It’s amazing how Binance bled 2 million Link tokens in a single day and holds a mere 24.62% of the tokens it had a week ago. Etherdelta is at 98.69%.

Still, Binance sees 94.18% of Link’s trading volume. Whatever happens there determines the token’s price and will until Link is listed at a new exchange. I’ve seen a couple of accounts play the arbitrage game between Binance and Etherdelta. Some say that bots are arbitraging the Binance LINK/ETH and LINK/BTC pairs. It sounds reasonable.

All in all, tokens are leaving the exchanges incredibly fast. Sure, people want to hold and that can be good, but let’s keep in mind that that a lower market liquidity means sharper price changes. It also means more price control for whoever holds large quantities of tokens in Binance.

In light of how many inactive tokens you’re holding in exchanges, I want to remind you of how risky that is. Remember Mount Gox? The Bitcoin they stole is worth $5 Billion now. Keeping your tokens in the Etherdelta wallet after seeing so many people lose their Link there just weeks ago seems too… bold? Brave? Ridiculous?

Wallets

The number keeps on growing and is at 11,564. That’s an extra 11,50% in a week. Growth was much slower yesterday, though. Might be because of the weekend, because of the Bitcoin fork or just because people are waiting to see what happens to the Link price before jumping in. FOMO and FUD are real.

News

Rory (Chainlink’s Community Manager) has been making the rounds on Slack and Telegram. He insists he and the team are working 7 days a week to bring us good news as soon as possible. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s talking about listing the token on new exchanges rather than announcing partnerships, which will probably take longer.

(There’s plenty of rumors about news, especially on /biz/. Trading on rumors is just like trading on emotions: You’ll regret it nine times out of ten).

The team has confirmed that they’ll be hiring developers and marketers. They’re also discussing ways to improve communication.

Finally, some people are beginning to set up Chainlink nodes.

Additional information

That’s all for today. If you share this article, please include the source. It feels very disrespectful when I see my content on Slack, Telegram or Reddit and my contact information has been carefully cropped out.

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