Chainlink Jumps 6% While Bitcoin and Ethereum Hold Steady

Chainlink’s native token, LINK, has jumped 6% in the past day while Bitcoin and Ethereum prices hold steady.

The LINK token is changing hands at $11.01 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko, having recently settled at a market capitalization of $6.1 billion. The token has roughly doubled its market capitalization since June this year. But it’s still a far way off its all-time high of $22 billion—last seen in May 2021.

Chainlink has been particularly buoyant since debuting its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) in July, which is aimed at simplifying cross-chain transactions.

Chainlink Leads Crypto Market Rally, Soaring 8% Overnight

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 Coinbase-incubated Ethereum layer-2 network Base.

At the time of writing, the world’s oldest and largest crypto asset Bitcoin was trading at $33,654.77 and sitting at a market capitalization of $657 billion. Although it’s down 4% from its high of $35,000 on Wednesday and down 1.5% in the past day, the coin is still up 14% from where it was a week ago.

The main cause of Bitcoin’s soaring price: Mounting hype and certainty among investors that the SEC will soon approve a spot Bitcoin ETF for trading. An exchange-traded fund is publicly traded, like a stock, but tracks the performance of an underlying asset or index rather than just one company.

BlackRock Preps for Bitcoin ETF Launch, Lines Up Seed Investor and Reveals Ticker

Meanwhile, Ethereum is sitting 1.6% below what it was yesterday, trading at $1,757.70 at the time of writing. Goldman Sachs analysts recently said they were optimistic about the network’s Dencun upgrade, even if it is expected to be delayed until 2024.

“Dencun’s primary impact will be to increase its data availability for layer-2 rollups via proto-danksharding, resulting in a reduction of rollup transaction costs which will be passed on to end users,” the bank wrote in an analysts note this week.

Layer-2 rollups allow unprocessed transactions to be batched, sent to another blockchain, like Optimism or Arbitrum, for settlement. Then receipts for the transactions are sent back to Ethereum mainnet. It’s meant to improve the overall scalability of the Ethereum network, which has in the past been prone to congestion and high transaction costs.

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