Repeated mentions of the Ethereum-based oracle project Chainlink (LINK), as well as Ethereum itself, on a Google development blog has caused a buzz in the last 24 hours, and a dramatic pump in LINK’s price – of up to 75% in the space of an hour on the night of June 13 (UTC).
The blog post mentioned “Chainlink” by name a total of thirteen times, while explaining how to integrate information drawn from Google’s own BigQuery, a cloud analytics web service, into the Ethereum blockchain via Chainlink.
Google dabbling in crypto. From the horse's mouth. #Ethereum #Chainlink $LINK +50%, $ETH unchanged.
(Source: https://t.co/WCSq5YsA8n) pic.twitter.com/v2fowd1WS1
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) June 13, 2019
Chainlink is an oracle platform, already in development for about two years. Broadly, an “oracle” in computing terms is a function designed to answer a given question.
In the case of Chainlink, it is an oracle designed to take data from real-world datasets and ensure that data’s veracity – a key piece of plumbing for incorporating information onto a blockchain. After all, information stored immutably on-chain is only useful if it is accurate.
Read, don't FOMO. It's not a partnership, even if it is cool. It’s from a developer advocate at Google (a position which is basically just marketing to developers), saying anyone running a Chainlink node can integrate BigQuery (a Google service). https://t.co/9u58CDwadw
— Ready Set Crypto (@readysetcrypto) June 14, 2019
The blog gave a high level explanation of how Chainlink could be useful in transferring BitQuery data to the Ethereum chain, along with several examples. Although this may certainly be an endorsement of Chainlink (and Ethereum) by a Google entity – the market certainly thought so – it is important to emphasize that there was no mention of an explicit partnership of any kind.
A Good Year
LINK had already been one of the top performing cryptos of the year before last night’s price explosion, even thriving during the 2018 crypto bear market.
(source: CryptoCompare)
Since June of 2018, the oracle crypto had climbed almost 500% versus BTC, again not counting yesterday’s price explosion. It has also done quite well versus the dollar.
(source: CryptoCompare)
We can see that much of last night’s gains have already been sold off. Nevertheless, LINK has stabilized at time of writing near about $1.60. We must note that, trading against both BTC and USD(T), LINK is now in a stage of “price discovery,” where no previous price history is present to inform us of a market structure – a fancy way of saying “anything can happen.”
At time of writing, LINK has a market capitalization of about $1.5 billion, according to CryptoCompare data.
