New whale wallets are accumulating Chainlink (LINK), raising suspicions about their goals

In the past five days, whales have been withdrawing Chainlink (LINK) from Binance and accumulating it in self-custodied wallets. The withdrawals were sent to newly created wallets, with a list of 30 addresses with whale holdings. 

Chainlink (LINK) has seen significant withdrawals from Binance, as the funds are sent to a list of 30 newly created wallets. The addresses now hold $34.1M in notional value, or 1.37M LINK. The biggest wallet holds more than 151K LINK, and the smallest withdrawal is for around 5K LINK. 

The rationale for the recent withdrawals remains unknown, as LINK is both used for speculative trading and as a utility token. LINK can also be staked for a small passive income. Holding LINK in a self-custodied wallet also allows for DeFi interactions.

Some of the LINK whale activity may be targeted at buying price dips and making use of the short-term volatility. However, despite the loyal holding, LINK is yet to break out to its previous peak, still retaining the range-bound pattern of the bear market.

Other use cases may include new forms of staking, including liquid staking with additional rewards. Some of the free LINK tokens have been deposited to the Stake.Link priority pool.

LINK is no stranger to whale activity, and this accumulation is seen as a potential sign for positive price action. LINK has also seen recent whale activity where one closely watched an address used LINK for short-term trades to realize gains of over $200K. 

The whale, known as pleven.eth, uses LINK for buying the dip and selling higher, making use of the token’s deep liquidity. That whale’s approach is to use decentralized services to flip between LINK and USDT, realizing gains for price swings happening within a day or even hours. 

The whale activity uses spot trades, while total LINK open interest has diminished from its 2024 peak. Long positions are now above 75%, potentially attackable with a downward price move. 

LINK continues to trade and consolidate in its higher price range, after briefly getting closer to $30. For now, the asset has not broken above that level, returning to $24.20. LINK is also a bit harder to pump, since only 15% of all trading activity remains on Binance.

LINK trades with a slight premium on Bithumb, as its Korean won pair has the equivalent of $25.39. However, not all international traders have a right to trade in South Korea, making this arbitrage more difficult. 

Chainlink focuses on financial services, cross-chain partnerships

Chainlink continues to behave as a utility project, avoiding direct hyping of its token. The platform is ranked at position #6 based on GitHub updates, making it one of the most actively developed projects. 

In the past months, Chainlink started adding more partnerships to its CCIP cross-chain service. After replacing Ronin’s bridge, Chainlink also took over the bridging of Neiro on Ethereum (NEIRO), as well as ApusCoin (APU). While those memes are relatively minor, they still mark a shift to more use cases for Chainlink. 

Chainlink still secures more than 53% of DeFi value, or over $36.79B. The oracle provider has partnered with 407 crypto projects, excluding experimental use cases in mainstream financial organizations. LINK is also found in the wallet of the Trump-backed DeFi lending protocol, World Liberty Financial, retaining more than 78K tokens since the initial purchase.

The Chainlink platform also built up a cult of long-term loyal holders, which appear to support the token even during drawdowns. For that reason, whale accumulation has been noticed during previous bull markets, potentially signaling a price breakout.

In the past few weeks, whales with more than 100K LINK in their wallets also shifted to more active accumulation. Small-scale retail users are selling, changing the token profile of the asset. LINK is 100% unlocked, and any shifts in the supply are happening on the open market. Around 50% of the supply is locked with node operators, limiting the freely available LINK for DEX activities and utility purposes.  

CCIP now offers cross-chain linking to 13 total blockchains, on track to replace other types of bridges and become a monopolist for cross-chain transfers. 

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