Over the past five days, Chainlink (LINK) whales have been withdrawing significant amounts of money from Binance and have been pooling their funds into their own wallets. The withdrawn funds were sent to a list of 30 newly created wallets. These wallets currently hold $34.1 million, or 1.37 million LINK. The largest wallet holds over 151,000 LINK, while the smallest transaction was for around 5,000 LINK. LINK can be used for both speculative trading and as a utility token, so the reasoning behind the recent withdrawals is unclear. Additionally, LINK can be staked to generate passive income, enabling DeFi interactions when held in self-custodial wallets.
Some of the LINK whale activity may be aimed at buying into price declines as an opportunity and exploiting short-term volatility. However, despite such investments, LINK has not yet reached its previous peak and remains in a bear market pattern. There are also new staking methods such as liquid staking. LINK tokens, some of which have been deposited into the Stake.Link priority pool, can potentially be used for new opportunities.
Whale movements are seen as a positive sign for the price of LINK to rise. Recently, one whale, Pleven.eth, took advantage of LINK’s liquidity to make short-term trades and made over $200,000. The whale aims to profit from price fluctuations by using decentralized services to move between LINK and USDT.
However, overall LINK’s open interest has decreased compared to its 2024 peak. Currently, long positions are above 75% and could be threatened by a downward price movement. LINK, although recently close to $30, continues to trade and consolidate in higher price ranges. LINK, which has fallen to $24.20, is also becoming more difficult to manipulate as 15% of its trading volume is solely on Binance.
LINK trades at a slight premium to the Korean won pair on Bithumb, but traders outside of South Korea are unable to participate, limiting arbitrage opportunities. Chainlink has generally positioned the platform as a utility project and has avoided standing out with this strategy. According to GitHub updates, the platform ranks 6th among the most actively developed projects.
Recently, Chainlink has started adding new partnerships to its CCIP cross-chain service. After taking over the Ronin bridge, it has also taken over the Neiro (NEIRO) and ApusCoin (APU) bridges on Ethereum. Chainlink secures over 53% of DeFi value, or $36.79 billion. It has also formed a large network by partnering with 407 crypto projects. Trump-backed DeFi lending protocol World Liberty Financial also has LINK in its wallet, which has over 78,000 tokens.