Chainlink’s native token LINK surged 6% over the past day, while Bitcoin and Ethereum prices remain stable.
The LINK token is changing hands at $11.01 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko, having recently reached a market cap of $6.1 billion. The token has almost doubled its market capitalization since June this year. But we are still far from the historic peak of $22 billion, last seen in May 2021.
Chainlink has been particularly dynamic since the launch of its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) in July, which aims to simplify cross-chain transactions.
Its early adopters include Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, as well as DeFi lending protocols Aave and Synthetix. And in September, Chainlink integrated CCIP into the layer 2 Ethereum network foundation incubated by Coinbase.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin, the world’s oldest and largest crypto asset, was trading at $33,654.77 and had a market capitalization of $657 billion. Even though it is down 4% from its peak in $35,000 Wednesday and down 1.5% over the past day, the coin is still up 14% from a week ago.
The main cause of the Bitcoin price surge: the growing hype and certainty among investors that the SEC will soon approve a Spot Bitcoin ETF for trade. An exchange-traded fund is listed on a stock exchange, like a stock, but tracks the performance of an underlying asset or index rather than a single company.
Meanwhile, Ethereum is 1.6% below where it was yesterday, trading at $1,757.70 at the time of writing. Analysts at Goldman Sachs recently expressed optimism about the future of the network. Dencun upgradealthough it is expected to be delayed until 2024.
“Dencun’s primary impact will be to increase the availability of its data for Layer 2 rollups via proto-danksharding, resulting in reduced rollup transaction costs that will be passed on to end users,” wrote the bank in an analyst note this week.
Layer 2 rollups allow unprocessed transactions to be consolidated and sent to another blockchain, such as Optimism or Arbitrum, for settlement. Then, transaction receipts are sent back to the Ethereum mainnet. It aims to improve the overall scalability of the Ethereum network, which has in the past been prone to congestion and high transaction costs.