According to data from CryptoCompare, at 01:00 UTC on Monday (July 13), the price of the Chainlink (LINK) token reach $8.396, setting a new all-time high (ATH) and helping LINK to enter the list of top 10 cryptoassets by market cap.

What Is Chainlink?

Here is how Binance Info describes Chainlink:

“Chainlink (LINK) is a decentralized network that provides information (oracles) to smart contracts.

“Founded in 2017 by Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis, Chainlink aims to solve the problem of off-chain information sourcing by smart contracts for their execution parameters. Smart contracts are designed to execute automatically when certain parameters are met, however, when these parameters exist off-chain there is a reliance on sources of information (known as oracles) to provide the necessary information. Off-chain oracles tend to be centralized and with it comes a reliance on a third party to provide critical information in a trustworthy and time critical manner.

“Chainlink aims to break this reliance by feeding information to smart contracts via a network of decentralized oracles that work together on the Link blockchain to verify and forward critical information to these contracts. The ChainLink network allows users who have either a data feed or information carrying APIs to easily provide information to smart-contracts in exchange for the LINK token.”

Chainlink’s Recent Price Action

Although the Chainlink token set a new ATH at 01:00 on July 13, since then the price has come down, and at the time of writing (06:26 UTC), LINK is trading at $7.732, up 26.26% in the past 24-hour period:

24 Hour CC Chart for LINK-USD on 13 July 2020.png

This means that in the past 90 days, LINK is up over 128% vs USD; even more impressive is that fact that since the crypto market meltdown on “Black Thursday” (March 12), LINK is up oveer 265%, and in the year-to-date (YTD) period, LINK’s return on investment is around +339%.

Why Is Chainlink Performing So Well?

As usual, the reason for LINK’s continued excellent performance in the market is the ever-growing list of partnerships (and other bullish news) announced by the Chainlink team, especially in the area of decentralized finance (DeFi). This is not surprising since many/most DeFi projects need real-time price data, and it is much safer to obtain this external data via a decentralied oracle network such as Chainlink than from just one source.

Here are projects that have announced integrations with Chainlink just in the past week:

Of course, it is impossible to predict where Chainlink’s token will go from here (although Chainlink’s most fervent fans would not be surprised at all if LINK crosses the $10 level before the end of this year), but it’s easy to understand investors’ optimism when the Chainlink keeps announcing at least 2-3 new partnerships almost every week.

What Crypto Analysts Are Saying About Chainlink

Popular crypto analyst/trader Josh Rager, who is also a Co-Founder of online crypto learning platform Blockroots, as well as an advisor to several blockchain startups, says that even Bitcoin maximalists should consider trading top performing altcoins such as LINK in order to increase their profits since Bitcoin has been trading in a very tight band for the past few weeks:

Another crypto analyst, Cole Garner, says that his technical analysis suggests that Chainlink might be about to go parabolic:

And finally, Scott Melker, a crypto trader at Texas West Capital, sounded the most bullish on Chainlink:

However, it is worth pointing out the extreme bullish market sentiment could be seen, from a contrarian point of view, as bearish for the near-term future of the Chainlink price.

Crypto-focused behavior analytics startup Santiment said earlier today: