Chainlink Booms Amid Swift Payments Update, Ethereum ETF Rush

With U.S. financial markets on hold for Memorial Day, the long holiday weekend has meant a relatively quiet start to the week for most crypto markets—but one digital asset is booming: Chainlink (LINK).

The 14th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, LINK is Monday's best performer out of the top 40 coins. CoinGecko data shows that it has risen more than 10% in the past day, and is now trading for $18.75.

LINK is the native token of Chainlink, an oracle project built on Ethereum that's designed to get information in and out of a blockchain—and between chains—securely.

The surge is likely the result of LINK holders and supporters feeling bullish on the news dropping that Chainlink would be co-presenting with international payments platform Swift at this week's Consensys conference in Austin, Texas.

The collaboration, which bore its first fruits last fall, is one that Chainlink has said proved that "existing infrastructure can merge with the new world of blockchains."

Chainlink project co-founder Sergey Nazarov, meanwhile, also expressed broad optimism for Ethereum and all digital assets over the weekend, following the historic approval of Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs), saying that it's “really just the beginning.”

“Just like many systems and protocols initially list Bitcoin and ETH and then eventually list a multitude of other tokens, that is really the trajectory that we're on,” he said. "It is a sign of a very clear trend that not only Bitcoin, not only ETH, but many other tokens out in the world will end up getting their own ETFs at some point, allowing the larger global capital markets to interact with that financial product.”

Chainlink has been on a roll lately, yesterday touting the progress its network has made across nine different blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base.

Earlier this month, DTCC—the biggest settlement and clearinghouse in the U.S.—announced that it used Chainlink's cross-chain interoperability protocol with Wall Street giants JP Morgan and BNY Mellon as part of a tokenization pilot. That pilot, dubbed Smart NAV, allowed Wall Street institutions to make mutual fund data available on public networks.

Finally, crypto investment firm 21Shares today featured Chainlink in its latest weekly research newsletter, saying it is “revolutionizing the realm of tokenization” and crediting it with enabling “over $10 trillion in transactions to more than 2000 projects over 22 separate networks.”

Despite the renewed interest in the Chainlink protocol, however, LINK still has a long way to go—a more than 64% climb—before it hits its historic 2021 all-time high of $52.70.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.