Chainlink exists to solve a problem that is easy to state and hard to fix: a blockchain cannot see outside itself. A smart contract can settle a bet on the price of gold, but it has no way of knowing what the price of gold is. Anything that depends on external information β€” a price, an interest rate, a sports result, whether a shipment arrived β€” has to be told, and whoever does the telling becomes the weakest point in the arrangement.

Chainlink is a network of independent node operators that supply that information, with multiple nodes reporting the same value and their answers aggregated, so that no single operator can move the result on their own. The network launched in 2019 and its price feeds became widely used by decentralised lending and derivatives protocols, which need reliable valuations to decide when a position should be liquidated.

LINK is the token used to pay node operators and, in the network’s staking arrangements, to give them something at risk if they report badly. The project has since extended beyond price data into cross-chain messaging, where the same problem appears in a different form: one chain cannot see another either.

Activity in the protocols that use it

Chainlink’s demand is derived. It grows with the value and volume of the contracts relying on its data, particularly in lending and derivatives, and contracts when that activity falls.

Oracle competition

Other oracle designs compete for the same work, including alternatives that publish data on a pull basis rather than pushing regular updates. Which approach protocols choose affects where fees accrue.

Node operator economics and staking

Payments to operators, and the amount of LINK staked as a guarantee of honest reporting, determine both the network’s security and how much of the supply is readily tradeable.

Broad crypto direction

Like most assets in the sector, Chainlink moves substantially with the market as a whole. The correlations shown on this page are measured from our own daily closes rather than assumed.

Chainlink trades continuously, and the price on this page is taken from our own market feed. The chart, the 52-week range and the performance figures are measured from our own daily closes, and anything the history cannot support is withheld rather than estimated. Nothing here is a recommendation or a forecast β€” our methodology explains how each figure is produced.