Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink (LINK) is the token of Chainlink, a network of independent operators that supplies blockchains with outside information, such as market prices, and moves messages and tokens between different blockchains. LINK is used to pay the operators for their services and is staked by them as a guarantee of good behaviour. It is an ERC-20 token with a fixed supply of 1 billion.

LINK is the token, and Chainlink is the service. A blockchain cannot see anything outside itself, so smart contracts that need a price, an interest rate or a payment confirmation rely on a go-between called an oracle. Chainlink is the most widely used oracle network in decentralized finance, and it has also become a common bridge between public blockchains and banks testing tokenization.

A smart contract is like a vending machine sealed inside a windowless room: it follows its rules perfectly but has no idea what is happening outside. If it is meant to pay out when the price of gold reaches a certain level, someone has to tell it the price of gold. Chainlink is a panel of reporters who each check the price from several sources, agree on an answer and slide it under the door.

Because many reporters must agree, no single one can easily lie or make a mistake that goes unnoticed. LINK is how the reporters are paid, and it is also the deposit they put down, which they risk losing if they misbehave. Over time the reporters have taken on a second job as couriers, carrying messages and money between rooms that cannot otherwise talk to each other.

Chainlink was created by Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis, who published its white paper with the Cornell computer scientist Ari Juels in 2017. LINK was sold in a token sale in September 2017, and the network launched on Ethereum in May 2019. Its price feeds quickly became standard plumbing for lending protocols such as Aave during the growth of DeFi in 2020.

Staking for LINK holders opened in December 2022, with a larger second version following in late 2023. In July 2023 Chainlink launched its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to selected users, and it became generally available in April 2024. Traditional finance has used the network in a series of trials: SWIFT published results of experiments connecting banks to several blockchains through Chainlink in August 2023, and later worked with it on tokenized fund settlement and on plans for production use announced in 2025. In 2024 DTCC, the main US securities settlement utility, ran a pilot with Chainlink to publish mutual fund net asset values on blockchains, part of wider work on tokenized funds. In August 2025 the US Department of Commerce began publishing official economic data on blockchains through Chainlink.

Each Chainlink service is run by a group of independent node operators. For a price feed, every node gathers data from several sources, and the network combines their answers into one value that it writes to the blockchain at regular intervals or when the price moves by more than a set amount. The main services are:

• Data feeds. Prices for crypto assets, currencies and commodities, used to value collateral and trigger liquidations.
• Proof of reserve. Checks that the assets backing a stablecoin or wrapped token actually exist; see proof of reserves.
• CCIP. A cross-chain protocol that sends messages and tokens between blockchains, with a separate risk network that can halt suspicious transfers.
• Randomness and automation. Verifiable random numbers for games and lotteries, and scheduled jobs for smart contracts.

Users of Chainlink services pay node operators in LINK, either directly or through fees converted into LINK. Operators and ordinary holders can stake LINK to back the reliability of certain feeds and earn rewards, and operators' stake can be reduced if they fail to perform. In 2025 Chainlink set up a strategic reserve that buys LINK with part of the revenue it earns from businesses using its services. LINK trades widely on crypto exchanges and is held as an investment. Demand for the token therefore depends both on how much DeFi uses the network and on whether banks and asset managers move their trials into everyday use.

Because so much of DeFi relies on Chainlink, a faulty or delayed price feed could set off wrong liquidations across many applications at once; critics call this a single point of failure. The network depends on a relatively small set of professional node operators, and its contracts can be upgraded by multi-signature keys held by a limited group, which some see as a trust assumption. Cross-chain transfers carry the general risk of any crypto bridge, a common target of hacks. Holders have also questioned how much of the network's growth flows back to LINK, and note that a large share of the supply was held by Chainlink's developers and released into the market over time.

• Chainlink
• Chainlink 2.0 white paper