Chainlink Price Prediction as Smart Money Buying Continues

Chainlink price resumed its strong surge today, Aug. 22, after Jerome Powell delivered a dovish statement at the Jackson Hole Symposium. LINK token jumped to a high of $26.70, its highest level since January 23rd. This surge could continue as smart money investors and whales buy, and as a bullish pattern forms.

Chainlink Price Boosted by Whale and Smart Money Investors Buying

One major catalyst for the ongoing Chainlink price surge is that whales and smart money investors have continued their buying spree this month, a sign that they believe the rally is just starting.

Data compiled by Nansen shows that whale investors have boosted their holdings by 27% in the last 30 days to 5.47 million. This growth continued a trend that has been going on since last year as these whales held less than 3 million LINK tokens.

Smart money investors, who are individuals or institutions with a track record of buying low and selling high, have also continued accumulating the LINK token. The chart below shows that LINK was the most bought token by smart mony investors in the last seven days.

More data shows that the number of LINK tokens still remaining in exchanges has continued to fall. There are 270 million LINK coins left in exchanges, down from 280 million earlier this month. That is a sign that it is not having more selling pressure as the number of LINK addresses rise.

Derivatives Data Point to More LINK Price Gains

Meanwhile, derivatives data show that the Chainlink price could continue rising this year. The chart below shows that the funding rate has remained in the green since June this year.

Funding rate is an important concept in the crypto industry because most exchanges offer perpetual futures unlike in the stock market. Perpetual futures are those that don’t have an expiry date.

The funding rate is the fee that helps to keep the prices balanced. In a positive funding rate, longs pay short sellers a small fee, and is a sign that they expect the price to keep rising.

Meanwhile, Chainlink’s open interest has continued rising this year, and is now at its all-time high. It jumped to $1.58 billion, in a sign of increased demand and liquidity.

The ongoing demand for Chainlink is due to its strong fundamentals. Data shows that it has over $57 billion in total value secured (TVS), much higher than other popular oracle networks like Band Protocol and Pyth.

Chainlink price has also surged as its role in the real-world asset (RWA) tokenization continues. It has already partnered with top companies like JPMorgan, ANZ Bank, SWIFT, Coinbase, and UBS.

Most recently, Chainlink launched the Strategic LINK Reserves that will accumulate tokens from fees made on-chain and off-chain. These reserves have now jumped to over $3 million.

Chainlink Price Technical Analysis

The daily chart shows that the Chainlink price has been in a strong bull run this year. It is slowly forming the highly bullish cup-and-handle pattern with an upper side of $30 and a lower point of $10. In percentage terms, this depth is about 67%.

Therefore, measuring 67% from the cup’s upper side gives the target price at $51, which will be its all-time high.

Summary

Chainlink price has been in a strong bull run in the past few months, which may continue this year. The bullish case is that Chainlink continues to dominate the oracle industry, bringing off-chain data, such as price feeds, on-chain.

LINK also benefits from the ongoing whale and smart money buying and its strong technicals, including the cup-and-handle pattern that point to more gains to over $50 in the near term.