The broader market remains to be bearish on the micro-frame and has not shown any signs of reversing its downtrend. With most coins sliding lower on their respective price charts, the global crypto market cap depreciated by 3% in the past 24-hours and merely reflected a value of $1.99 trillion at the time of this analysis.
Following the footsteps of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the market’s 20th largest coin Chainlink has also been treading on quite a similar path. Down by more than 7.3% when compared to the previous day, LINK has been hovering around $23 of late.
Now, as highlighted in an article yesterday, the odds of LINK’s correction going deeper this week seems to be pretty high. Most of the indicators on its price chart currently depict bearish outlooks, plus the coin has not been able to cling onto crucial support levels.
Despite the gloomy price environment, the Chainlink ecosystem has been buzzing with activity, reassuring its optimistic long-term prospects.
2022 – A year to achieve milestones?
In a recent presentation about the future of the network, the project’s Co-founder, Sergey Nazarov outlined the key initiatives for this year, with the focus remaining on staking.
Elaborating on the same, Nazarov said that the team plans to release staking in “this coming year.” He also emphasized the time spent “feverishly working” to help ensure Chainlink’s staking model is set to deliver the maximum degree of security, which will come to fruition when an early version is released.
Well, staking has been the hot topic of discussion for quite some now but looks like the wait is about to end soon.
Apart from that, the team would also work on Chainlink’s CCIP or Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. The same is set to enable hybrid contracts this year.
Besides the said developments taking place, Chainlink’s adoption remains impressive and the multi-chain smart contract ecosystem continues to be powered by Chainlink. Last week alone, 17 projects adopted Chainlink across 7 different blockchains and 5 independent oracle services.
What the future holds
Now, LINK’s fundamental metrics have been getting stronger since the beginning of this year. The network-to-transaction value ratio, for instance, has managed to gracefully rise from its 5 January lows to create a new local peak.
The NVT is basically calculated by dividing the network value by the daily transaction volume. So, high NVT values usually indicate that the network value is more than the value being transferred on the network and vice versa.
Looking at the way things have kickstarted this year on this front for Chainlink, it can be said that the network is in its legitimate growth phase.
Chainlink has just like that not carved a niche for itself in the space. The live data provided by its oracle services provides solutions and aids its clients to solve real-world issues. Thus Chainlink’s adoption rate is bound to increase with time.
Plus, going forward, Chainlink would also retain the first-mover advantage. So, as long as new partnerships keep coming on the table and the network genuinely grows, LINK’s long-term prospects would, by and large, remain un-dented.