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 Money playlist, and if you want to talk any of this through, I'd love to have you in the Jerry Banfield Family.
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.