Chainlink (LINK) price, chart and history
Chainlink is $14.04, down 2.53% in the last 24 hours. Market value $10.50 billion, rank #14.
About Chainlink
Chainlink is a network of oracles: services that deliver outside information, such as asset prices, to blockchain applications, which cannot fetch that data on their own. It also runs CCIP, a system for moving tokens and messages between different blockchains. The LINK token is used to pay the node operators who provide these services and can be staked to back the network's reliability.
Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis started the company SmartContract in 2014 and, with Cornell professor Ari Juels, published the Chainlink whitepaper in September 2017. A token sale that year raised about $32 million by selling 35% of LINK's supply. The oracle network formally launched in 2019, and Chainlink Labs now leads development alongside many independent node operators and a growing list of banks and financial firms testing its tools.
Chainlink is not its own blockchain; it works on top of other networks, and LINK is a token on Ethereum. Groups of independent nodes each fetch data and combine their answers so that no single source decides the result. The supply is fixed at 1 billion LINK. Critics note that only about a third of tokens were sold publicly, leaving much of the rest with the company, and that key services rely on a limited set of operators.
- Created by
- Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis, with Ari Juels
- Launched
- 2019 (oracle network); token sold in 2017
- How it's secured
- Decentralized oracle nodes, backed by LINK staking
- Supply
- Fixed at 1 billion LINK