Fast payment updates, Chainlink boom amid Ethereum ETF rush

With U.S. financial markets on hold for Memorial Day, the long holiday weekend marked the start of a relatively quiet week for most cryptocurrency markets. But one digital asset is booming: Chainlink (LINK).

LINK, the 14th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was the best performer among the top 40 coins on Monday. It’s up more than 10% in the past day and is currently trading at $18.75, according to CoinGecko data.

LINK is the native token of Chainlink, an Ethereum-based oracle project designed to securely bring information into and out of blockchains and between chains.

This is likely the result of LINK holders and supporters feeling optimistic following the news that Chainlink will be co-presenting with international payments platform Swift at this week’s Consensys conference in Austin, Texas.

The collaboration, which first came to fruition last fall, is what Chainlink said proved “existing infrastructure can be merged with the new world of blockchain.”

Meanwhile, Chainlink project co-founder Sergey Nazarov expressed broad optimism about Ethereum and all digital assets over the weekend following the historic approval of the Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF), saying “this is really just the beginning.” said.

“Just as many systems and protocols initially list Bitcoin and ETH and then eventually list numerous other tokens, this is really the trajectory we are going on,” he said. “It is a very clear sign of a trend that Bitcoin, ETH, as well as many other tokens in the world, will have their own ETFs at some point, allowing the larger global capital markets to interact with those financial instruments.”

Chainlink has been on a roll lately, with yesterday touting the progress the network has made across nine different blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base.

Earlier this month, DTCC, the largest U.S. clearing house, announced that it had used Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol alongside Wall Street giants JP Morgan and BNY Mellon as part of a tokenization pilot. The pilot, called Smart NAV, allows Wall Street institutions to use mutual fund data on public networks.

Finally, cryptocurrency investment firm 21Shares today introduced Chainlink in its latest weekly research newsletter, stating that it is “revolutionizing the tokenization space” and that “it will unlock over $10 trillion in assets for over 2000 projects across 22 distinct networks.” “It made the transaction possible.”

However, despite renewed interest in the Chainlink protocol, LINK still has a long way to go, rising more than 64% to reach its 2021 all-time high of $52.70.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.