Chainlink (LINK) Review: Why I Sold and Why It Heads to Zero

I sold my Chainlink (LINK), and I now think it is heading to zero. I held it in 2023, hyped it for a while, and then got out, because the more I researched it the less I saw a reason to keep holding a token whose main job is feeding outside data to blockchains that cannot fetch it on their own. My view is that the technology behind it is being made irrelevant, and that the token gives holders no legal or code-based ownership over what the Chainlink team builds.

This page gathers both of my LINK posts in one place. The newer one is my message to Chainlink holders about why I sold, and the older one is my full Chainlink review from June 2024. Below this opening you will find the contents list and then both posts in full, newest first. If you only want the short version, it is this: oracles are a workaround, Internet Computer does not need one, and the LINK token does not own anything.

In the 2024 review I started from the basic job Chainlink does. Ethereum and Solana cannot host large amounts of data, cannot host websites or video on chain, and cannot pull a price from Coinbase by themselves, so a third party like Chainlink became part of the stack. My argument was that Internet Computer can make HTTPS outcalls straight from an application, so developers building there would not need an oracle at all. I used OpenChat as my example, because it shows my token balances without going through Chainlink. I wrote that the coin had already had a great bull run and had very limited price potential, and I concluded it was on its way to zero.

The ownership argument was the other big part of that review. A Chainlink token is an ERC-20 on Ethereum. It gives you no legal ownership over the Chainlink Foundation or the infrastructure it runs, which makes it a pseudo-stock with none of a stock's rights. Real ownership, as I put it, comes from legal rights or from code, and Chainlink has neither.

Two years later, in the newer message, I went much further. The point I still consider the most important is the one AI tools will not surface for you: if developers learn that ICP can reach any website directly, the oracles of the future may not be needed at all, and that makes every other criticism of Chainlink worse. The rest of the post covers centralization. The oracle network looks far more centralized than claimed, with a small number of nodes handling a large volume of price feeds, and the nodes are not on chain. I also flagged the lack of slashing, although newer oracle networks do have it, and the absence of any real DAO or formal governance.

The token economics were the part that made me sell. The main utility of LINK is paying node operators, who could be paid in stablecoins just as easily, and who may simply sell what they receive. The community I was part of was toxic about insiders constantly dumping and unlocking tokens on holders, and that is what made me ask why I was the one getting dumped on. I also looked at the holder data. Chainlink has more than 700,000 holders, but the top 100 wallets still hold around 70 percent of the supply, the top 500 hold 82 percent, and a large share sits on exchanges where it can be sold at any time.

So the arc is simple. In 2023 I held LINK and believed the hype. In June 2024 I wrote that the technology was becoming irrelevant and the token was a leap of faith. By 2026 I had sold and was pointing to centralization, weak token utility and missing governance as reasons the same conclusion still holds. I am not a financial advisor and none of this is financial advice. I also hold a meaningful amount of ICP myself, so you should judge my bias with that in mind and check the sources yourself.

If you want to test my reasoning, start with the research method in How to Research a Crypto Before You Buy, and read the newer message first, since it covers the criticism in the most detail. For the other side of the comparison, see my Internet Computer hub.

If you are holding LINK right now and want to know how I would look at your own position, you can get a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

Dear Chainlink LINK Holders: Why I Sold My Link

From my video published June 17, 2026.

This is a message addressed directly to Chainlink holders. If you're holding LINK, this is important for you to read, because I've held Link before, I bought into all the hype, and then I sold it. I care about your success as a crypto investor, and I have some information that I think is very important for you to digest and think about when it comes to Chainlink. Note up front that I'm not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. I have tens of thousands of Internet Computer Protocol, so you can clearly see what my position is and what I've put my own money into.

With that said, you might wonder why I held Chainlink in 2023, hyped it up for a while, and then sold it. It's because of the research I'm about to walk through here. I'm not going to act like I'm some expert who knows everything. I'll tell you straight: you can look all of this up yourself. You can go to ChatGPT or Grok and they will lay all of this out in writing for you if you just ask them to give you all the criticism for Chainlink, and then you can put these pieces together in your own head.

The criticism even the AI tools won't surface

One of the biggest things I have that ChatGPT and Grok will not tell you is that Internet Computer Protocol is allowing developers to build in an environment where you don't need oracles at all anymore. If you somehow don't know what Chainlink is and you're holding it, Chainlink is basically solving the problem where all blockchains besides Internet Computer Protocol cannot actually go get data from the outside world. They need a third-party service to come in and, for example, tell them what the price of Ethereum is on Coinbase. That's the role Chainlink has been fulfilling.

When you build on Internet Computer Protocol now, though, you can build everything: your front end, your back end, your website, all the databases. You can even put AI models on chain. And then Internet Computer Protocol has HTTPS outcalls, so you can go directly to Coinbase from within your application on ICP and pull the feed there without using Chainlink at all. So to me, the number one criticism that Grok or ChatGPT won't even have for you is that oracles in the future are not even going to be used anymore, which makes all the other things I'm about to say so much worse for Chainlink.

Centralization and the on-chain problem

The other concerns are easily replicated and easy to look up in more detail. One of the big technical criticisms with Chainlink is that everything appears to be very centralized from what I can see. The oracle network looks much more centralized than claimed, with a small number of nodes handling a large volume of price feeds. That means you're going through a centralized third party again, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid in crypto. It removes any thought of real decentralization. There's also very little transparency in how the nodes are operating. And the nodes aren't even on-chain.

Do you realize Chainlink is just an Ethereum token? Yes, it has been bridged over to other blockchains, but Chainlink is not a Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchain. Internet Computer is actually both a Layer 1 and a Layer 2, and on Internet Computer Protocol you can do everything fully on-chain. With Chainlink, you're talking about just an ERC-20 token. That ERC-20 token has no control over whatever they're doing at the Chainlink Foundation. It has no legal ownership. It's not a stock. If it were a stock, it would carry legal ownership over whatever they're building. But the Chainlink token does not give you legal ownership over all these oracles and infrastructure that sit off-chain. To me, that is a massive problem.

The Chainlink token also doesn't give you ownership by code. On the Service Nervous System on Internet Computer Protocol, you can create tokens that actually give you ownership by code over the protocol, so you can build things that at least have the potential to be truly decentralized, assuming the token ownership is real. With Chainlink, absolutely not. In my mind there's no real thought of any actual decentralization, because the Chainlink Foundation controls all the things that are creating real value for Chainlink.

And the problems keep stacking up. There's no slashing mechanism. If the Chainlink nodes aren't working properly, that's an issue, although when it's centralized they can just handle it themselves. There are newer oracle networks that do have actual slashing mechanisms to manage the nodes. Still, the biggest problem is all this reliance on off-chain data input. You cannot verify the integrity of the data when you're pulling it off-chain.

Why I sold: the token and the community

Those are the primary technical concerns, but there's even more. I've been very critical of Chainlink over the years because the token itself, to me, basically looks like a meme coin. When I did hold Chainlink and was participating in the community, the community was very toxic about the amount of LINK that the insiders were constantly dumping on all the holders. That's what got me thinking: these insiders have huge amounts of tokens, they're constantly dumping and unlocking, so why am I being the fool that's getting dumped on all the time?

That comes back to the weak utility for the LINK token. The primary utility for the token appears to be paying node operators. Seriously, the node operators could be paid in fiat or stablecoins or any other currency. It just means Chainlink takes the tokens and gives them to node providers, who you can imagine then just dump the token. What is the point? I don't see the real value of that. The node operators appear to be centralized. It doesn't seem clear how they're even chosen or how they're managed, and the only value of the token is that node providers get paid in LINK. This looks so bad. And that's why I sold.

A lot of what you see with Chainlink moves on hype and partnerships, not on real usage of the token. This is something you can look up yourself: look at the partnerships Chainlink has announced and see what good has actually materialized from them. You can see the price move off of these announcements, but what real outcome has come from them? I don't see anything. It seems almost all speculation and hype.

No real governance, and a shaky foundation

Critics also point out that it took Chainlink years just to roll out simple staking. And when you look at the governance, there's no community-based DAO or formal governance system at all. Other coins have these, even though in most cases they don't provide much genuine value and it still ends up being centralized. But at least other coins make it look like there's a DAO, even if the developers do the opposite of what the DAO votes for sometimes. On Internet Computer Protocol, you have a real DAO that's fully on-chain, where anyone for $5 can buy an ICP token, stake it, and vote. On Chainlink, to me, the lack of governance kills the utility, because there's not even the appearance of a DAO. So I see absolutely no reason to hold the LINK token outside of hype, speculation, and hoping the price goes up, which to me is insane.

When you look at what else is happening in the market, you've got all these other oracles popping up, and then you've got ICP. To me, this is a recipe for disaster: very high risk, very low potential return. On top of that, ChatGPT will tell you that Chainlink's feeds are expensive, especially for smaller protocols, which pushes them to explore alternatives like Internet Computer Protocol or other oracles. Chainlink is also very dependent on Ethereum. The less Ethereum is adopted, the more the competitors thrive. Ultimately, the Chainlink token is an ERC-20 token, so the more liquidity flows out of the Ethereum ecosystem, the worse that is for Chainlink.

And all of this is possible because of a lack of retail understanding. In my view, 90-plus percent of LINK holders do not understand the actual utility of the token. It just looks to me like a cult-like project. This is exactly why you need to understand this stuff for every token, blockchain, and Layer 1 crypto you hold, because this is what really matters.

Think it through for yourself

So if this has made a difference for you, again, I'm not a financial advisor and I'm not telling you what to do with your investments. What I am telling you to do is think about the information I've shared. Try looking this stuff up for yourself on ChatGPT or Grok, which will give you all of this in much more detail along with sources. Think about these things more, and consider where the future is going. Chainlink has a bigger market cap than Internet Computer Protocol, despite ICP having, in my opinion, the absolute best tech in crypto. And the fact is, any money you have in LINK is money you can't have in anything else. You can't have it in the bank, you can't buy something with it, and you can't have it in a different crypto. To me, this is a really important message, and if you want to go deeper on how I think about money and crypto, you can explore my Crypto Reviews playlist.

Chainlink (LINK) Crypto Review: Why I Think It's Heading to Zero

From my video published June 13, 2024.

Chainlink is a cryptocurrency token on Ethereum that has been copied over to other chains, and in my opinion it is on its way to zero, because the technology behind it is already irrelevant. There is vastly superior technology that lets you build things without oracles, and I believe all the new blockchains of the future will not need oracles at all. I think I am one of the first people who sees this coming for Chainlink, which is exactly why you will want this information if you are holding it.

So I am going to go into the price chart. We are going to look at the holders. We are going to talk about the team, and we are going to compare Chainlink to the technology that is already here that, to me, is making Chainlink irrelevant.

The price chart and market cap

Chainlink right now is at $15, which puts it at a market cap of $15 billion fully diluted. That means there are billions and billions of dollars worth of tokens that Chainlink has that they can dump. I was holding Chainlink myself last year, and the community was very often toxic about the team and the token dumpage, and in my opinion things have only just got started. We haven't even seen what's coming.

Chainlink has also been around for a while, and the most important first thing I need to emphasize is that this is a token. It is not its own blockchain. Tokens have extremely limited utility, and this is a pseudo-stock type of token. Chainlink has also already had a great bull run, and it's rare that cryptos have a better second bull run than their first one. Chainlink kind of missed the bull market initially in 2017, and the things that tend not to age well are cryptos and altcoin tokens. So to me this has very limited price potential as to how far up it could go. I think there are a lot better gains you are going to be able to make than Chainlink, especially because, in my opinion, the price is going to be totally compromised by a lack of utility in the future.

What Chainlink actually does

So if you look right now at Chainlink, what does this actually do? Well, this is a token that is based on the use of oracles. If you go to Chainlink and look at the website, you use Chainlink if you're building applications that are connected to blockchains but are not real Web3. Real Web3 is having everything on chain, where it's all secured by smart contracts and by cryptography. Most of crypto right now is built the way it is because things like Ethereum and Solana cannot put meaningful amounts of data, like gigabytes of data, on chain. They can't host websites on chain. They can't put pictures on chain. They can't put videos on chain, or if they could, it's extremely expensive. And they can't even pull price feeds from Coinbase.

So what does Chainlink do? If you're building a crypto application, for example on Ethereum, you might set it up so your application integrates with MetaMask. Then if you wanted to swap tokens, you would have to bring Chainlink in, or another oracle, because the Ethereum blockchain itself doesn't know the price of all these other tokens. It can't keep all that data updated in real time because it's too expensive. So you have things like Chainlink that actually pull all this other information in, like the price in US dollars of a crypto token you want to swap for. Chainlink becomes part of the tech stack you use to build applications, swap out your tokens, and bring in all kinds of other information that is not directly on the blockchain.

Why I think ICP's HTTPS outcalls make Chainlink irrelevant

This is now becoming a problem for Chainlink because of new technology out on the Internet Computer Protocol called HTTPS outcalls. If a developer builds their application on the Internet Computer Protocol, you can simply build your HTTPS outcalls directly into your website or application, like on OpenChat. I'll give you a working example of this. OpenChat right now is able to tell me exactly what all my different tokens are worth immediately. They don't need to use Chainlink, because it is built on ICP and has HTTPS outcalls, so they can pull the exact data for all of these different tokens immediately without using Chainlink.

This means that with HTTPS outcalls, you can do anything you could do on a regular website. You can send emails and integrate with other blockchains. This allows ICP to actually create Bitcoin private keys and addresses and make transactions on other chains. That functionality is so powerful that, in my opinion, as soon as developers find out about ICP, they no longer need to build with Chainlink or any other oracle anymore. If you want to go deeper on this, I cover it constantly in my ICP Crypto playlist.

So to me, Chainlink has peaked. It was very important technology back when everybody was building on Ethereum and all these other blockchains that are basically Ethereum copies. It was very important technology to bring all this stuff that's not on the blockchain and integrate it. But this also makes Chainlink very centralized. Chainlink can pull the different price feeds from wherever it wants to, and in theory that could be decentralized, but Chainlink is now a centralized point of failure where it's all going through Chainlink. All these third-party price feeds are getting fed through Chainlink.

The bigger problem: a token with no real ownership

So I see the long-term viability of this as almost zero, because HTTPS outcalls make Chainlink irrelevant. But there's an even bigger problem. Chainlink is a token. It is a token on the Ethereum blockchain, and they've copied it over to some other blockchains. Because this is a token, it's essentially a pseudo-stock.

And I say pseudo-stock because, let's say you buy some Coinbase stock. Your Coinbase stock gives you legal ownership — a small portion if you don't have that much stock, a large portion if you do. It gives you legal ownership. It gives you legal rights. The stockholders can then make changes to the company. The stockholders have legal value in the company. They have legal ownership of the company. For example, when Twitter sold to Elon Musk, the people who were holding shares of stock got paid for it because they had legal ownership of a part of the company.

On Chainlink, your ERC-20 tokens do not give you any legal ownership over the Chainlink protocol, or over anything that the group of people who control Chainlink create. So anything the team at Chainlink makes — this token is purely speculative and a leap of faith. The Chainlink team tries to give the token value, but the token itself gives you no legal ownership over anything. So even in theory, if the Chainlink team made a huge amount of money off of Chainlink, they have no responsibility to give the token any of that value. They can, in theory, accept payments with whatever tokens they want. You don't even need the Chainlink token.

And because Chainlink is a token on Ethereum, it has no real DAO properties either. Even if there was a DAO vote with the Ethereum tokens — which I don't really see happening, though some of them are trying to act like that — it's basically just a polling mechanism. It doesn't actually execute anything.

Real ownership comes from legal rights or from code

The second way you can have real ownership with a token is if it's fully controlled by code, which on the Internet Computer Protocol you can have, because everything is built on chain. Your tokens give you real voting power and real control. So since you can't have legal ownership of the token, what you need instead is physical ownership by code.

For example, if I managed to get more than 50 percent — a controlling majority — of the tokens for the application OpenChat that I use, which is linked on jerrybanfield.com and is fully hosted on ICP, I could literally do anything I wanted with this entire application. I could drain the treasury and send it to my personal wallet. I could kick the development team off of the application and bring my own developers in. I could literally do anything I wanted. The only thing I wouldn't have any control over would be the URL, because that's something off chain that can't be held directly on chain — but I could just host the whole website on a different URL and point to that. That is real ownership by code.

So if you don't own something legally, or with code, your underlying token has no value. My token for OpenChat that I'm holding has value because when I vote, it executes the code, and it's all hosted on chain. Chainlink, the token, has no real control legally or through code. Therefore, to me, the token is empty speculation, a leap of faith, a hope that the Chainlink team will deliver value.

Who exactly is the Chainlink team?

And who exactly is the Chainlink team? It's nice they have these pictures of the Chainlink team, but who are these people? What is their experience? Is this a marketing person? Is this a developer? Unlike many of the cryptos I've seen, at least they do have some pictures on their website, which shows they have some pride in what they do, and they're not just ripping people off, which is great. They've got Eric Schmidt from Google as an advisor, which is pretty good, and they have some other advisors. But who exactly is building on Chainlink? And who exactly is committed to giving the token value? These are extremely big questions.

To me, once the people holding Chainlink figure out that this is a house of cards built totally on a leap of faith that somehow Chainlink is going to add value to this token — which they have no legal responsibility to do — it could collapse. And I believe if it collapses because the technology is becoming irrelevant, within a cycle or two, it's going to collapse, because the technology is not needed anymore. People are finding out about and building on the Internet Computer organically for free. It's bringing all these developers over from Bitcoin and Ethereum, because ICP is a Bitcoin and Ethereum layer two. And DeFi applications are being pushed by regulators toward chains like the Internet Computer, where they can actually claim to be truly decentralized. This is the same migration I wrote about in when Ethereum DeFi collapses, the money will flow into ICP. In my opinion, the only people who end up making money here are the Chainlink team, and they're working on what is now outdated technology.

So to me, Chainlink is on its way to zero — in my opinion, absolutely by the next bull market.

My honest verdict and how I stay accountable

By the 2029 era, I think this is an old token that has gone by the wayside, that had its day, and that just bleeds out as people stop using its technology. Then the team ends up cashing out, selling everything, and in my view it goes to zero.

I make these crypto reviews and put up a few as often as I can. You all asked me to review Chainlink, and I'm being accountable to you here. Every single day I have a spreadsheet where I put every crypto I review, tracking the price of that crypto versus the ICP price every day. So far, even since the ICP price just tanked, the other cryptos are up 7 percent against it. In the short term, sure, we can fluctuate a little bit, but let's see where we go long term. I commit to you that no one else has the level of transparency I do with my own work and my own portfolio. I've been in crypto for 10 years. I researched this thoroughly, I held Chainlink last year, and I did further research, and my honest conclusion is that this is not going to work out well. You can find all of these honest reviews in my Crypto Reviews playlist, and if you want to talk any of this through, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and bring it to a weekly call.

The holders tell the same story

One final thing I'll mention: Chainlink does have a good amount of holders, with 700-and-some thousand holders, which is pretty impressive. Although, some days you'll notice there are only like 20 or 30 new wallets. Sometimes the actual number of wallets on Chainlink drops. By comparison, you have something like the Internet Computer, where there are new internet identities constantly being created. The accounts and the cycle burn rate — ICP is relentlessly growing, whereas Chainlink is actually dumping some holders on some days.

And if you look, the top 100 holders on Chainlink still have around 70 percent of all the tokens. Chainlink is incredibly centralized. You do have some non-circulating supply, and we don't know whether that's been burned or whether it could circulate at some point. But you've still got the vast majority of the tokens sitting in a handful of wallets — 100 wallets holding 70 percent of the tokens. If you expand out to the top 500 wallets out of 700,000, those top 500 have 82 percent of it. You've also got a bunch of it sitting on exchanges. You should never have your crypto sitting on an exchange, but for ERC-20 tokens you almost have to keep them on an exchange so you don't get scraped by gas fees and withdrawal fees. So there's a bunch of people just speculating on the value of Chainlink who can dump it at any time, and the price can be manipulated up or down at any time. To me, this does not look like a good idea.

So for the long-term investment, in my opinion, I think it's going to go more toward zero than anything that I would want to invest in. I've made my position clear, and I've given you my honest review of Chainlink. If you held LINK and want to hear why I personally got out, I went deeper on that in my message to Chainlink (LINK) holders on why I sold, and if you'd like a similar breakdown of another token I believe is heading the same direction, I'd point you to my Arweave (AR) review.