31st October 1929: In a London club run by St Phalle Ltd, members watch fluctuations in the New York stock market during the Wall Street crash as changes are chalked up by telephone operators in direct contact with New York. (Photo by London Express/Getty Images)
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Decentralized oracle network Chainlink’s LINK token and open-source blockchain Tezos’ XTZ coin traded higher, shrugging off the lackluster action in major cryptocurrencies.
At 09:37 ET, LINK was trading at $9.7, topping the list of best performing cryptocurrencies of the past 24 hours with a 6.7% rise, according to Forbes data. Meanwhile, XTZ took the second spot with a 6% rise, followed by names like Terra Luna Classic (LUNC) and VeChain’s VET token. The losing side included Dfinity Foundation’s internet computer (ICP) token, down 6%, and Decred’s DCR and Huobi token, down 4% each. Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, traded flat at around $30,000.
On Wednesday, Chainlink, which provides blockchain networks with price feed data collected from sources both on and off blockchains, unveiled an updated timetable for the implementation of the staking program first announced in April 2021 and revisited in January this year. The announcement likely galvanized interest in cryptocurrency. Prices have risen over 20% since then, as seen in the chart provided by TradingView.
LINK rallies to one-month high.
TradingView
Staking is expected to bring a new layer of security and decentralize the oracle network by providing network participants with rewards and penalties to incentivize the network’s proper operation. Staking, a crypto market’s version of passive investing, refers to depositing coins in a network to boost its security in return for rewards.
Chainlink will reward stakers native token emissions from the LINK token supply and a portion of services paid by users. The oracle plans to implement staking called v0.1 later this year with an initial pool size of 25 million LINK tokens.
Chainlink is the biggest crypto oracle with a market value of $4.36 billion, according to coingecko. Several DeFi heavyweights like Compound, AAVE, Synthetix, and Nexus Mutual have integrated Chainlink’s price feeds over their platforms. The oracle’s price feeds recently went live on Solana’s mainnet.
Ropsten merge fails to lift ether
Ether, the native token of Ethereum’s blockchain, traded sideways at around $1,800, with buyers sitting on the fence despite the successful merge of Ethereum’s oldest test network Ropsten’s proof-of-work chain with the proof-of-stake beacon chain.
The goal of the Ropsten merge, which happened on Wednesday, was to prepare the Ethereum mainnet for a similar merge, which is expected to happen sometime later this year. The mainnet merge, once completed, is expected to have bullish implications for ether’s price.
“We can summarize the positive case as: (a) reduced issuance to miners, thus less structural selling pressure + (b) a substantial increase in the real staking yield to 7-10%,” Ilan Solot, a partner at the Tagus Capital Multi-Strategy Fund, said in an email. “But here’s the part I think is less discussed by commentators: the Merge might be equivalent to a 300-600 bps Fed hike for the Ethereum economy.”
However, the upgrade failed to attract buyers to the ether market, leaving the cryptocurrency locked in its recent triangular consolidation.
Chart showing ether’s triangular price consolidation.
TradingView
Caution ahead of Friday’s US inflation report, which could cement the case for faster liquidity tightening by the Federal Reserve, likely kept traders from making big commitments in bitcoin and ether.
The consumer price index due for release on Friday at 08:30 ET is likely to show the cost of living in the world’s largest economy rose by 0.7% month-on-month in May – a big jump from April’s growth rate of 0.3%.