Summary ChainLink USD offers significant upside potential due to its real-life utility, and the current price dip presents a good buying opportunity. ChainLink enables smart contracts on the Ethereum platform, streamlining business transactions and eliminating third-party intervention. Real-world projects include partnerships with Sygnum, SWIFT, and UBS Asset Management, enhancing transparency and efficiency in financial transactions. ChainLink supports Web3 gaming and collaborates with AccuWeather for smart contract applications, showcasing its versatility and broad utility. ChainLink USD ( LINK-USD ) has lots of upside price potential as it has actual real-life utility in various areas of the business world. The recent dip in price presents a good buying opportunity. ChainLink has a good chance to ride the Bitcoin & crypto bull market in 2025. ChainLink USD's Background ChainLink is considered an oracle that takes off-chain data and places it onto the blockchain in a secure manner. ChainLink was created in 2017 by Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis, who co-authored the original whitepaper with Ari Juels, a professor from Cornell University. ChainLink operates on the Ethereum ( ETH-USD ) platform as a cryptocurrency. This functionality enables various decentralized services. One important service that ChainLink enables is smart contracts, which are a set of instructions that can be executed without intervention from third parties. An example of a smart contract looks something like this: If goods arrive on time, then execute a payment from the retailer to the supplier for the full amount. If the goods arrive one day late, then execute a payment for 99% of the full amount. Another example includes financial services where if a user deposits collateral into a specific smart contract, then they could get a loan up to 50% of the value of the collateral. Additional terms can be set up. For example, another term could be: if the collateral/loan value drops to a certain level, then the user's collateral would be automatically liquidated and transferred to the lenders. Another term could be lenders depositing funds into a smart contract. Other users can borrow from pre-defined collateralization ratios, while the lender receives interest on the loan. We can see from these examples how smart contracts could speed up business transactions and make them more objective & reliable, while eliminating the need for third parties to execute them. Current Real-World Projects Using ChainLink ChainLink is involved in hundreds of projects in the areas of decentralized finance [DeFi], blockchain, NFTs, gaming, tech project building, and data providing. Here are a few examples of ChainLink's partnerships/real-world projects. ChainLink Partnerships (CoinGape.com) One major trend for ChainLink is that global finance is moving onchain. Earlier this year, ChainLink partnered with Sygnum and Fidelity International to provide fund Net Asset Value [NAV] data onchain. Sygnum is a global digital asset banking group that tokenized $50 million of Matter Labs' company treasury reserves. These reserves are held in Fidelity International's money market fund and were issued on the ZKSync blockchain. ChainLink enables the NAV data to be accurately reported and synchronized onchain in an automated and secure way. This provides real-time transparency and built-in access to historical data for Sygnum, its customers, and for other market participants. In addition to this collaboration, ChainLink also enables NAV data to securely spread across any blockchain or existing offchain system. ChainLink collaborated with SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) and UBS Asset Management to bridge tokenized assets with existing payment systems. This project enables digital asset transactions to settle with fiat payment systems across more than 11,500 financial institutions and over 200 countries/territories. This solves the inefficiencies involved in the subscription and redemption process such as manual interventions, lack of real-time transparency, and delayed settlements. These inefficiencies can increase costs, reduce liquidity, and lead to missed investment opportunities in the $63 trillion global mutual fund market. Sergey Nazarov, one of the founders of ChainLink believes that the upcoming adoption of these payment capabilities will increase the flow of capital and expand the possible user base of digital assets. ChainLink supports Web3 gaming, which uses the blockchain to decentralize the game experience, giving the players more control. ChainLink oracle networks power top blockchain gaming apps, which helps provide dynamic and unpredictable gaming experiences. This enables fairly distributed rewards based on randomness or predefined achievements. It also allows for an unbiased game winner selection, which increases fairness and transparency. Also, it allows for truly dynamic NFTs that react to offline data or time/state changes. AccuWeather launched a ChainLink node to supply and sell data directly to smart contract apps running on multiple blockchains. AccuWeather also uses the node to cryptographically sign its data so that users know for sure that it originated from them. Here are some use cases that AccuWeather is implementing with smart contracts via ChainLink: weather prediction market for hedging against future droughts or sea level rises, parametric crop and natural disaster insurance for regions where it is currently inaccessible, supply chain automation that shifts due to forecast alerts, and digital artwork using NFTs that change based on weather conditions. Wingman is an airline flight delay prediction app that has a live node on ChainLink. Wingman is built on the Polygon ( MATIC-USD ) blockchain. Wingman is designed to transform idle airport wait time into an opportunity for profit. The app allows users to predict flight delays and rewards them with MATIC cryptocurrency for accurate predictions. Wingman also has an AI prediction system designed to forecast future flight delays, giving users valuable insights. Those were just a few of the hundreds of projects that ChainLink is involved in. ChainLink's investment Opportunity ChainLink Labs is the company that is behind this technology. However, ChainLink Labs is not a publicly traded company. So, the opportunity for investors is to buy the cryptocurrency known as ChainLink USD at brokerages [ Coinbase ( COIN ), Robinhood ( HOOD ), etc.] or platforms that offer it. To consider investing in ChainLink, investors should have a good understanding of Bitcoin's ( BTC-USD ) halving cycle. The prices of all other cryptocurrencies tend to correlate with the price of Bitcoin. However, ChainLink did trade with different patterns as compared to Bitcoin in its first few years. You can see my opinion on how Bitcoin may perform in 2025 at this link. Since ChainLink the cryptocurrency doesn't have revenue or earnings, we can use Bitcoin's cycle and technical analysis to determine how the coin may perform in 2025. Based on past cycles, Bitcoin is projected to experience a bull market until about October 2025. Of course, Bitcoin and ChainLink do experience significant declines within bull markets. This past week marked one of these declines as the price of ChainLink declined from about $31 down to about $20 before recovering a bit to the current price of about $22. At the same time, Bitcoin dropped from about $108 down to about $92,000 before recovering a bit to the $97,000s. ChainLink's Monthly Chart ChainLink (LINK-USD) Monthly Price Chart with RSI and MACD (TradingView) We can see on ChainLink's monthly chart above that the price tends to top out after the purple RSI line (middle of the chart) moves above the 80 level. ChainLink's RSI is currently in the $63 to $64 range. So, there is likely to be more upside if the current Bitcoin bull market lasts as long as previous cycles. I noted in my last Bitcoin article that the past 2 bull cycles lasted exactly 1,064 days. So, that is why many are projecting October 2025 as the possible top for the current bull market. Therefore, I see the recent dip as a buying opportunity for those who haven't bought ChainLink yet. The current price dropped back down to a prior resistance level around $22. It is possible that it holds this level and turns it into support. If the $22 support level holds, the price may test the next level of resistance between $29 and $31. If the $22 level doesn't hold, it could drop down into the teens, where prior support exists at about $15. ChainLink's Long-Term Outlook As for a long-term projection to about October 2025 (where Bitcoin price may peak), my educated guess says that the price would at least reach the all-time high in the low $50s. Other analysts have more optimistic projections for the price to reach $100 by this time . Others are less optimistic with a price projection of about $45. The target price of $100 looks realistic considering that the price has gone significantly higher during each Bitcoin halving cycle. Increased adoption of ChainLink into more projects can be the catalyst for the price over the long-term beyond 2025. The risk for ChainLink is that the price is highly volatile - even more than Bitcoin. The price could drop 90% from the top of a cycle to the bottom of the cycle. So, investors might consider taking profits when the RSI reaches 80 as this is where the price tends to peak in past cycles. Another risk is that ChainLink's competitors could be considered more attractive for new projects. This could take market share away from ChainLink and threaten its long-term growth. ChainLink competes with Pyth ( PYTH-USD ) which has experienced strong growth in the past year. Other competitors include: WINkLink ( WIN-USD ), Chronicle , and Switchboard . Currently, ChainLink dominates market share among this group with about 47% of the market. WINkLink has the next highest market share with about 16%. Pyth is next in line with about 11% of the market. Various other competitors comprise the remaining 26% of the market. If ChainLink is successful in maintaining and growing its market share, then the price could go significantly higher through the remainder of the decade. Investors should consider ChainLink as highly speculative due to the uncertainties regarding its success and its price action. Therefore, only invest an amount of money in ChainLink that you are willing to lose.
