On Sunday (August 9), Band Protocol (BAND) and Chainlink (LINK), the tokens of the two most successful decentralized oracle projects in the crypto space, are continuing their dazzling 2020 bull runs, seemingly recording double-digit percentage gains day after day, and racing up the crypto market cap tables.
And if this is not FOMO (“Fear of Missing Out”) buying that we are witnessing, then we might not have to wait much longer for that because, sooner or later, these two super hot cryptoassets—as well as the decentralized finance (DeFi) space in general—are bound to get noticed by mainstream media.
In case you are wondering why decentralized oracle networks are so important to the crypto space (and the DeFi sector in particular), hopefully the paragraph below will explain the motivation behind them.
Many non-trivial smart contracts need communication with external systems, e.g. to access off-chain data (such as price feeds, weather information, information about real-world events such as elections, and random numbers) and APIs. Unfortunately, the blockchain platforms these smart contracts run on cannot natively offer this kind of functionality (i.e. external connectivity). Smart contracts could turn to centralized oracles for help, but using a single node results in a single point of failure. That’s why we need decentralized oracle networks.
To get an idea of how well these cryptoassets have performed in 2020, here are some return on investment (ROI) figures (vs USD) for BAND and LINK:
Band Protocol (BAND)
- 1 Day ROI: +20.93%
- 7 Day ROI: +257.47%
- 30 Day ROI: +772.87%
- 90 Day ROI: +1706.78%
- Year-to-Date (YTD) ROI: +6032.25%
Chainlink (LINK)
- 1 Day ROI: +9.45%
- 7 Day ROI: +67.85%
- 30 Day ROI: +126.24%
- 90 Day ROI: +288.06%
- Year-to-Date (YTD) ROI: +668.65%
The chart below from TradingView looks at how BAND and LINK have performed throughout 2020:
It is hard to think of a cryptoasset that has performed better (against USD) than Band Protocol (BAND) with its YTD ROI of +6032.25%.
However, this does stop many people in the BAND community from believing that there is room in the decentralized oracle market for more than just one player and that BAND’s bull run is not going to be over anytime soon since its market cap is currently less than 6% that of LINK, and they feel that with all of the new partnerships that the Band Protocol team is expected to announce within the next 12 months, it would be very surprising if BAND’s market cap did not increase to become around 10–20% of LINK’s market cap, especially with all the recent attention that BAND’s spectacular 2020 performance and its upcoming launch on Coinbase Pro has received:
As for Chainlink, today, for the second time this weekend, it became the sixth most valuable asset by market cap, overtaking both Bitcoin SV (BSV) and Cardano (ADA).
Popular crypto analyst/trader Josh Rager, who is also a Co-Founder of online crypto learning platform Blockroots, as well as an advisor to several blockchain startups, offered on Friday (August 7) the following tip for trading LINK:
In case you are wondering how long some of the sky-high valuations we are seeing in the crypto space—especially with regard to any token that is is used in DeFi—are going to last, Larry Cermak, the Director of Research at The Block, offers the following words of advice:
Featured Image by “RonBerg” via Pixabay.com
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
