Can Chainlink Reach $10,000?

Chainlink is a decentralised network of oracles that allows smart contracts to interact safely with real-world services and data beyond the realms of blockchain technology. But can LINK, its native currency, reach a value of $10,000?

Put simply, Chainlink enables current, traditional, and modern economies to securely, efficiently, and transparently connect to the emerging blockchain space in social and business processes. Can Chainlink reach $10,000 by 2030? Will LINK have a solid 2023?

What is Chainlink?

The crypto and blockchain space is ever-growing. Research suggests that the global blockchain technology market size will reach $1431.54B by 2030, at a CAGR of nearly 88% between 2023-2030. To put it into perspective, the industry was valued at $10.02B in 2022!

Currently, the largest chunk of the global blockchain technology market is dominated by financial services, with government, healthcare, media and entertainment, retail, transport and logistics, and travel commanding significant traction.

Chainlink has established itself as a key constituent of numerous blockchain applications. The Web3 services platform is poised to grow further as more players enter the industry. What is Chainlink exactly, and why should you know about it? Here is what makes the blockchain platform stand out.

What makes Chainlink stand out?

As blockchain enthusiasts, we all know the primary purpose of blockchain technology is to eliminate the middleman through decentralised architecture and enjoy the benefits of reliable and secure data computation and storage systems.

Blockchain technology, however, is much more than the simple moving and recording of funds on a decentralised ledger.

Some high-level programmable blockchains allow for the execution of commands that are more expressive in nature through applications built on the chain that execute actions based on predefined, consequential events.

An example of such a command set is: if Pizza Delivery X is not delivered within 30 minutes, issue a Refund of Y to Customer Z.

These blockchain applications are called 'smart contracts' and have been the subject of major blockchain development since Ethereum (ETH) introduced them on an enormous scale in 2015.

Now, the problem is that much of the data required by smart contracts to execute commands is not readily available on the blockchain. Blockchain technology does not allow for external data fetching either, as there is no ability built-in permitting smart contracts to connect with the external world.

Hence, real-world datasets such as enterprise systems, web data, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, sports scores, and asset prices (and pizza delivery details!) are simply unavailable on decentralised ledgers. This deficiency severely impacts smart contract development.

However, there is a silver lining. This is where Chainlink comes into the picture (big time!). A software constituent called an 'oracle' can provide this data to the blockchain. The oracle mechanism, however, must possess the same reliability and security properties of the blockchain to avoid counterparty risk.

A single centralised oracle is a single point of failure - if the oracle fails to deliver accurate results or results at all, the entire smart contract is at risk.

Chainlink, with its decentralised oracle network, comes to the rescue. The Web3 services platform was built to allow smart contracts to automatically transfer data between blockchains and external systems securely and reliably.

A decentralised network of oracles gathers data from numerous sources, aggregates it, and delivers a validated, solitary data point to a smart contract, enabling the contract to execute a set of commands accurately. This eliminates the possibility of a single point of failure.

Furthermore, Chainlink provides several layers of security that extend the boundaries of decentralisation, thereby ensuring that users can trust the platform. These features include:

• Generalised architecture.

• Data signing.

• High-quality data.

• Blockchain agnostic.

• Service-level agreements.

• Reputation systems.

• Oracle and data privacy.

• Advanced oracle computations.

You can think of a Chainlink oracle as a composable piece of architecture. In today’s blockchain sphere, interoperability is the need of the hour. Along with being blockchain agnostic, Chainlink oracles ensure a high level of composability. Here is what Stani Kulechov, CEO of Aave, had to say about the same:

“Part of composability is that you don’t have to build everything by yourself. Chainlink’s oracle is very good, and it’s part of this whole composability idea, it’s vital.”

High words of praise indeed. To put it into perspective, the company itself has outlined a massive 77 smart contract use cases it enables, the primary ones being decentralised finance (DeFi), insurance, gaming, and traditional systems.

If it has not been made evident yet, technologies like Chainlink will play a massive role in shaping what the projected $1T+ global blockchain technology market is meant to be in years to come.

That said, what role does LINK, the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency, have to play in the grand scheme of things?

## Can Chainlink reach $10,000 in 2023?

LINK price prediction: basics of the cryptocurrency

LINK is an ERC-677 token (an extension of ERC-20), and it plays a crucial role in the ecosystem. The ecosystem is supported by many smart contract developers, security auditors, node operators, and data providers. Anyone can become a node operator on Chainlink.

LINK compensates these node operators for retrieving data from external data sources, converting it into a blockchain-readable format, off-chain data computation, and uptime guarantees. LINK first caught the public eye when it stormed to $52.7 in May 2021.

Of course, several keen investors had their eyes on the token long before that. According to Coingecko data, at the time of writing, the cryptocurrency's price is $8. The market cap of the crypto token is just over $3.93B, with a 24-hour trading volume of nearly $720M.

The crypto asset has a total supply of 1B tokens and a circulating supply of over 491M tokens. As mentioned, LINK reached an all-time high of 52.7 on 10 May, 2021, and an all-time low of $0.149 on 29 November, 2017. Let us see how the cryptocurrency has fared in the past 12 months.

Source: Coingecko

If we look at the above chart, 2022 was quite a rocky year for the digital asset (the same holds true for the entire industry!). After reaching the summit of $18.08 on 4 April, the cryptocurrency slumped to $6.58 on 13 May. That said, LINK has had a great start to 2023.

The crypto asset started the year at $5.57, and at the time of writing, it is at its highest yet (this year, of course), at $8.

LINK price prediction 2023

It is near impossible to predict the price LINK could reach in 2023. That said, the signs are positive and the market is showing signs of recovery after a horrid end to 2022 following the SBF saga.

LINK has already crossed the $8 barrier. With the Ethereum Shanghai Hard Fork around the corner, we could see a push toward $10 very soon. Will LINK match its all-time high levels in 2023? Unlikely. But we may see LINK push towards $20, as it did in April 2022.

Anything is possible, and if macroeconomic conditions ease up and we head into a bull market (never say never), the sky's the limit. We advise you to trade wisely and follow market updates on a daily basis before making a long-term investment decision.

Can Chainlink reach $10,000?

Okay, let us do the maths. At LINK's current supply of 491M tokens, for each token to be valued at $10,000 would mean that the cryptocurrency's market cap is a crazy $491B! Impossible? No.

Likely? Probably not.

To put it into perspective, the world's most valuable crypto asset, Bitcoin (BTC), has a market cap of just over $460B at the time of writing. LINK is ranked 23rd on the list of crypto assets with the highest market cap.

LINK is more likely to hit the three-digit mark in the future than the five or even four-digit mark. Historically speaking, LINK seems to be a sound investment, as it does not abide by usual altcoin movements, meaning it is relatively less volatile than other cryptocurrencies. That said, DYOR at all times, and hope for the best.