After a relatively damaging start to the cryptocurrency market’s new year, a recovery could be seen creeping in for many top assets over the past two weeks. This includes the native currency of the decentralized oracle network Chainlink. It shot up over 14% during this time, after losing over a quarter of its valuation in January. LINK has even breached the significant $18 mark, leaving analysts to become bullish on its price action once more.
Scaling Development Activity
This resurgence can be attributed to larger market trends. Interestingly, on-chain analytics platform Santiment revealed that an acceleration in development activity on the network has accompanied its price growth. So much so that earlier on 7 February, its significant daily GitHub updates managed to cross that of Ethereum, the network upon which Chainlink is built.
??? #Chainlink is currently sitting at just under $18 after the mild #altcoin resurgence over the weekend. We notably have seen that $LINK‘s development activity, measured by significant daily #github updates, is now outpacing $ETH‘s daily activity. https://t.co/ZIk3qCUKPZ pic.twitter.com/AEbAUuaQqU
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) February 7, 2022
LINK developers have been making an average of 304 major update submissions per day, which has surpassed not just Ethereum, but also the most popular blockchain, Bitcoin.
This win appears more significant when Ethereum’s own acceleration in development activity, due to the upcoming merge to ETH 2.0, is considered. It seems that Chainlink is also taking its developmental roadmap seriously. And, working hard towards introducing staking and the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol on the network.
Just a reminder that the roadmap for @Chainlink this year is extremely comfy:
• #CCIP
• Staking + staking rewards
• Data Marketplace
• Abstraction layer for web2 = open the floodgates to TradFi enterprise clients+ ISO20022 <> SWIFT <> gpiLINK (#PoweredByChainlink)$LINK pic.twitter.com/u7bagevEhx
— ? Linkie 2.0 #CCIP (@ChainlinkoracIe) January 31, 2022
Too late for Chainlink?
However, this bullish narrative could not be noted in Chainlink’s social sentiments, which have continued to fall down since mid-January. Santiment data indicated that Chainlink’s social volume was down to 35 at press time, down from a 2022 high of 195 achieved on 1 February.
A similar downfall in Chainlink’s Weighted Social Sentiment could also be noted, which dropped to less than one at the time of writing. However, prices are known to bottom out when the metric reaches such lows. Thereby, indicating that a reversal could be in the books for the network.
Surprisingly, there has been an enormous dip in Chainlink’s network growth. The network growth calculates the number of new addresses that transferred the token for the first time, essentially indicating the state of network adoption. The indicator has been in free fall since mid-January, having reached lows not seen since March 2020. This is despite the huge number of projects that have recently integrated Chainlink’s services on their networks.
Source: Sanbase