Chainlink (LINK) continues its upward trend with three main catalysts that could affect the sentiments of community participants. The price of the altcoin is trading at $16.43 at the time of writing this article. With a more than 190% increase since the first day of the year, LINK’s growth is expected to continue.
The biggest trigger in Chainlink’s rise was the Staking v0.2 update. The protocol reported high interest from investors seven hours after opening early registration to the community pool for the transition from the old version to the new one, with 19 million LINK staked in the last 24 hours. With the improved reward and demand mechanism in Staking v0.2, a significant increase in demand for Chainlink’s LINK is expected.
According to data from the data platform Santiment, the funding rate of the altcoin on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance increased for the first time in four weeks, signaling an upward trend, and investors’ confidence grew, making long positions dominant. Santiment evaluates that the continuation of more investors and traders taking long positions with the expectation that the LINK price will rise will accelerate the altcoin’s move towards the $20 level.
The final catalyst in the LINK price increase is the investor sentiment in the market, which has the potential to affect LINK’s price. Around Chainlink, there are many positive factors ranging from the approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF by the SEC to innovations and increasing integrations.
In addition to the factors mentioned above, LINK continues to be an altcoin of interest for investors and maintains its position as the top decentralized oracle powering the majority of Web3 protocols. Chainlink’s ability to integrate into non-blockchain-based platforms makes it an even more attractive protocol and indicates a very bright future for the protocol.