Chainlink

LINK pays for Chainlink, a network that brings outside data to blockchains.

Chainlink is a network of independent node operators that feed real-world information, such as asset prices, into smart contracts and pass messages and tokens between blockchains. Services of this kind are called oracles. The design comes from a 2017 whitepaper by Steve Ellis, Ari Juels and Sergey Nazarov. LINK is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, created on 16 September 2017, and it is used to pay node operators for their work.

The supply is fixed at 1 billion LINK, all minted in 2017. About 748 million LINK circulated on 27 September 2026. The rest sits in non-circulating wallets listed by Chainlink and is released at about 7% of total supply a year; the company behind Chainlink, now Chainlink Labs, is entitled to 30% of the supply and has sold part of it over time. Since August 2025 the Chainlink Reserve has converted service revenue into LINK and held more than 5 million LINK by September 2026.

Holders can stake LINK in Chainlink Staking v0.2, launched in December 2023 with a 45 million LINK cap. Staked LINK backs the ETH/USD price feed and is delegated to node operators; rewards at launch came from a fixed emissions budget, and only node operators can lose stake if the feed fails.

Chainlink's price feeds are widely used by decentralised finance, including lending protocols such as Aave, and by prediction markets. Its cross-chain protocol CCIP moved $4.9 billion in Q2 2026, and banks and asset managers such as the DTCC, Fidelity International and Amundi use Chainlink for tokenised funds and settlement projects. In the US, LINK is named as a digital commodity, and a spot Grayscale fund has traded since December 2025.