Chainlink Price Surges To $16.75, Overtakes Bitcoin Cash As Top 5 Crypto

Chainlink (LINK) closed at $16.75 on Wednesday, a new daily all-time high that allowed it to overtake Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as the world’s 5th largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

LINK’s value has significantly increased in the last two days and currently trading at $17.24, a 32% increase onwards a possible new all-time high. LINK’s increase started substantially July 6, when it breached past $5 after trading sideways in the last two months. It finally breached past $10 on Aug. 6 and had a tremendous upsurge two days later, when it plowed past $13.

Currently indicators like RSI are signalling that LINK is at oversold levels since Aug. 3. According to Timothy Peterson of Cane Island Alternative Advisors, it is possible for LINK to go as high as $33 by the end of 2020. However, he warned that a move like that would be unsustainable because most of Chainlink’s growth has been priced in already.

Peterson touched upon the topic of Zeus Capital, a company that accused Chainlink recently of massive price manipulation. According to the analyst, Zeus Capital’s FUD (the act of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt) did not have an impact on LINK’s price. In his research "A Two Factor Model for Valuing LINK," Peterson said the only two factors affecting LINK’s monthly price is Ethereum’s price and LINK’s user growth.

The current price is a 1,361% increase from its price early this year which was at $1.18.

Data from crypto ranking website Coingecko puts LINK’s market cap at $6.6 billion vs. Bitcoin Cash’s $5.2 billion. Now that LINK is on fifth place, above it is Tether (USDT) with a market cap of $12 billion. According to Ethereum World News, LINK needs to be valued at $28.9 to overtake Tether. Market cap refers to the total number of coins in circulation multiplied by its current price.

Still, LINK’s 24-hour volume of $2.2 billion is on par with third-ranked XRP’s $2.2 billion and Bitcoin Cash’s $2.8 billion.

The surge in decentralized finance (DeFi) has been the catalyst for LINK’s success. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network aims to provide real-world data to smart contracts on the blockchain. According to Vance Spencer of Framework Ventures, most of the DeFi ecosystem rely on Chainlink to connect offchain data on smart contracts to off-chain data feeds, such as commodities and crypto price data, he said Aug. 10 as Chainlink approached $14. The company announced 26 new clients last July, bringing its total number of clients to 239, a number that includes Google and Oracle.