3 reasons why Chainlink (LINK) price just surged

• Chainlink crypto price surged to the highest level since April.

• Whales have started accumulating the coin after the CCIP launch.

• Open interest in the futures market has jumped to 2021 highs.

Chainlink price went parabolic on Thursday as investors cheered the recent product news and purchases by whales. LINK token soared to a high of $8.20, the highest level since April 20th this year. It has jumped by more than 65% from the lowest level in June.

LINK whales are buying

Chainlink price is surging for two main reasons. First, the developers unveiled plans to introduce a new Cross-Chain Interoperable Protocol (CCIP), as I wrote here. This is an important upgrade in the network that seeks to join traditional finance companies to the blockchain.

CCIP will expand Chainlink’s use case by making it possible for companies like banks and insurance firms to join the blockchain. The announcement came a  month after Chainlink announced that it was running a trial of linking banks to the blockchain through its partnership with Swift.

Second, there are signs that whales have started buying the coin. Data shows that two whales acquired 788,877 LINK tokens this week. They bought these tokens by swapping their stETH and ETH tokens for LINK. Historically, accumulation by whales is usually one of the best buy signals in the market.

Chainlink open interest is rising

Meanwhile, data by Coinglass shows that open interest in the futures market jumped to the highest level since November. Open interest is an important metric in the futures market that denotes the number of futures contracts held by market participants. A higher figure is usually a bullish sign.

Chainlink’s open interest has jumped to more than $267 million, with most of them being from Binance. The other leading exchanges are Bybit, OKX, and Bitget among others.

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