Grayscale Adds Chainlink to Its Large-Cap Crypto Fund, Providing Tailwind to LINK Price

Eugene Makarenko
Openware
4 min readApr 12, 2021

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Grayscale Adds Chainlink to Its Large-Cap Crypto Fund 2021
Grayscale adds Chainlink to its Large-Cap Crypto Fund in 2021, providing tailwind to LINK token price
  • Grayscale’s Digital Large Cap Fund has included Chainlink as an official investment offering.
  • Chainlink’s oracles are used by Ether and the dYdX Protocol.
  • LINK price has confirmed a breakout and has room for a 20% upswing.
  • It Is Intended to Fill the Hole Left by the Removal of XRP.

Grayscale Investments, which was founded in 2013 by its parent organization Digital Currency Group, is a trusted authority on digital currency investing and cryptocurrency asset management which specializes in providing market insights as well as investment exposure.

As of recently, they have added Chainlink’s LINK cryptocurrency to the Digital Large Cap Fund.

Chainlink (LINK) Briefly Explained

Chainlink is this decentralized oracle network that connects smart contracts with data from the real world and is developed by Sergey Nazarov alongside Steve Ellis.

It had an ICO all the way back in September of 2017, which raised $32 million and had a total supply of 1 billion LINK tokens. The cryptocurrency itself is a native currency on the Chainlink decentralized oracle network and can be seen used to pay node operators.

Node providers that hold a larger amount of LINK can be rewarded with large contracts, and if they end up failing to deliver accurate information can result in the deduction of these tokens.

The token, LINK, is an ERC-20 token with additional ERC223 transfer and call functionality.

You can read more about the Chainlink project and LINK token at the Yellow Blockchain exchange directory.

LINK’s Addition to Grayscale

Throughout a recent announcement, the Grayscale Investment Company had revealed that their Digital Large Cap Fund, also known as GDLC, included Chainlink’s native token known as LINK. This step marks the entry of this oracle token, alongside other cryptocurrencies that you might know, such as BTC, ETH, and so on.

Discussing how this occurred, it follows this freshly launched Grayscale Chainlink Trust, opening LINK up to interested investors.

Now, at the time of writing, the company holds 115.570 LINK tokens. Other developments that are happening are the integration of Chainlink oracles by StarkWare, which is a blockchain company that creates L2 scaling solutions, and this development is intended to help the company extend oracle functions to high-performance solutions that are layer 2.

Now, one of the biggest leaps for Chainlink’s adoption was the entry it had into the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) space through the Ether Cards Company.

NFTs have unlimited potential, and Chainlink can help with this.

Now, to give you a bit more of a perspective, NFTs are these new, future collectables. They can represent anything, and they are sought after due to their scarcity.

NFTs originally launched on the Ethereum blockchain through the ERC-721 token standard. They became available on other blockchains as well. They essentially contain information recorded in their smart contract, and this information is the unique aspect of each and every NFT.

Now, the beauty of Chainlink is in the fact that it aims to provide this bridge that fills this gap between blockchain technology-based smart contracts and real-world applications. Blockchains can’t really access data outside of their network, so oracles, which are a DeFi instrument, are needed to function as data feeds in the smart contracts. Through Chainlink, these oracles are connected to the Ethereum network, so it can provide external data that triggers smart contract executions once predefined conditions are met.

The Rising Demand for Chainlink’s LINK

Furthermore, as it becomes a component of a popular fund, this can create demand for the asset, and as such, its price will rise.

If we take a look at the historical LINK price graph from Yellow, we can indeed see that the coin has actually risen in value throughout the past week, and at the time of writing, April the 12th, 2021, is valued at $33.18.

Chainlink (LINK) price upswing after April 2021 Grayscale announcement. Historical price chart by Yellow.com.
LINK token price on the April 2021 upswing after the Grayscale announcement. Courtesy of Yellow.com.

This means that the LINK token is getting publicity, and as such, should appeal to the eyes of a lot of new investors. Assuming the technology takes off, this bridge will do wonders for blockchain technology, and we cannot wait to see what the future of Chainlink holds.

Now, when it comes to the features of Chainlink, it offers a reliable, tamper-proof network through using decentralized, trusted nodes, premium data, and cryptographic proofs to connect highly accurate as well as available data and APIs to just about any smart contract.

It can seamlessly connect to any IP, and this is made possible due to the fact that it is built on a flexible framework that can retrieve data from any API, and connect with even existing systems and, as such, integrate with both existing blockchains and ones that will come out in the future.

The Future of Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink is an integrated battle-hardened and tested oracle solution that secures billions of dollars in value for marking-lending blockchain projects, but where it truly shines is in the fact that you can independently monitor and even verify Chainlink’s open-source code and the performance of the oracle networks as well as the quality of the individual node operators.

Aside from all of this, Chainlink is an open-source technology that is collectively developed by this large community of software developers, as well as researchers and just users who share a passion for building Chainlink into something good that can inevitably benefit the entirety of the blockchain ecosystem and world.

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Eugene Makarenko
Openware

Writer, Reader, and Nomad. Chief Editor, CEO & Founder @ Attirer.io