Chainlink’s LINK Is Rising as Whales Add to Their Holdings Following the Release of the Protocol

Data shows Chainlink tokens soared on Thursday as wealthy investors traded Ether for Link (LINK) following the release of the company’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol earlier this week.

LINK was trading at $8 in Europe at midday as trading volume doubled to $580 million. This helped boost weekly gains to over 25%.

On-chain data shows some whales or large wealth holders are amassing up to $6 million in link holdings this morning. Increased demand has pushed prices up by as much as 6%.

CCIP was developed to support the development of cross-chain services and applications. At least 25 partners tested it, which is now moving to mainnet. It was made available to early access users of the Avalanche blockchain, Ethereum, Optimism, and Polygon.

CCIP is available Thursday for all developers on five testnets including Arbitrum Goerli (Avalanche Fuji), Ethereum Sepolia (Optimism Goerli) and Polygon Mumbai.

CoinGecko data also shows that the prices of other Oracle protocols have increased. In the last 24 hours, Band Protocol BAND is up 9% and Uma UMA and API3 are each up 5.4%.

Oracles are blockchain-based services that retrieve data from sources outside of a blockchain. Blockchains are inherently immutable stores of data, but they cannot verify information. Oracle networks like Chainlink can help. They draw on multiple data sources to provide users with reliable information.