Chainlink tokens surged Thursday as wealthy investors swapped ether for Link (LINK) following the release of the company’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) earlier this week, data shows. LINK exchanged hands for $8 around midday in Europe as trading volume more than doubled to $580 million, helping extend weekly gains to over 25%. On-chain data revealed some whales added upward of $6 million to their Link holdings during the morning, pushing prices up by as much as 6%.
CCIP is designed to help build cross-chain applications and services, and is now available to all developers across five testnets: Arbitrum Goerli, Avalanche Fuji, Ethereum Sepolia, Optimism Goerli, and Polygon Mumbai. Prices of other oracle protocols also rose, with CoinGecko data showing Band Protocol’s BAND added 9% while UMA’s UMA and API3 both jumped 5.4%.
Oracles are blockchain-based services that fetch data from outside a blockchain. Chainlink is one such network that provides reliable data to blockchain-based services and products for users. “On-chain data shows some whales – or large holders of an asset – added upward of $6 million to their Link holdings during the morning, with the increased demand lifting prices as much as 6%,” said CoinGecko.