Chainlink bullish scenario into 2022Explanation and Fundementals:
Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network providing secure decentralized blockchain agnostic services to both public and private blockchains. The Chainlink network token is used to pay for jobs and as collateral for services on the network. Currently the network secures roughly the equivalent value as the LINK token market cap, providing some correlation between adoption of the network and price. This is due to the tokenomics of the coin as well as investor speculation. CEO of Chainlink, Sergery Nazarov has estimated that by the end of the year it is possible that the total amount invested in DeFi protocols will be close to a Trillion dollars. With Chainlink having a 90%+ dominance over the oracle market it could be fair to say that at a minimum half of that Trillion dollars would be secured by the Chainlink network. Expanding on the previous idea of correlation between value secured and market cap of the LINK token it could be possible that the market cap of LINK pushes half a Trillion dollars.
Starting August 5th of 2021 is SmartCon #1. This will be the second Chainlink focused conference led and funded by the team at Chainlink. Last year the main takeaways were the creation of Chainlink Labs, a separate team from the Chainlink team purely focused on the highly technical problems of the software implementation. The team at Chainlink Labs is lead by Cheif Scientist Ari Juels, one of the co-authors of the original Chainlink 1.0 whitepaper which outlined the original implementation of the network. Along with the acquisition of Ari Juels as Chief Scientist of Chainlink Labs came the onboarding of a research project called DECO (chainlinkecosystem.com) which can be used to verify almost any piece of digital information about someone (Social Security #, Name, DOB, Age, etc) using zero knowledge proofs via Chainlink Oracles. During this process no party sees any information about you, eliminating almost all inherent security implications associated with such valuable personal data. With the advent of the second SmartCon it is rumored that the first version of "staking" will be released or published to the test network. Staking (technically explicit staking) is one of the most essential pieces to the protocol, as it implements crypto economic security which is vital to the decentralization and functionality of the network. Staking will require all partners and those who want to use the Chainlink network to purchase the LINK token in order to participate. It will also require them to put a stake onto the smart contracts they secure. A full technical wrap up of Chainlink's staking model is given the the Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper (research.chain.link). The speculation involved in this idea has SmartCon #1 being the catalyst for the crazy price action leading into the end of the year. This also means that it is very possible that LINK stays in accumulation leading up to August 2021.
Price Analysis
At the moment the crypto market as a whole is wishy washy. Online consensus is fairly split between bulls and bears (short and medium term). Long term outlook on most ends is bullish. Being that crypto speculators tend to have very poor judgement in price, it would be possible to say that crypto is actually bullish short-medium term, possibly aligning into a blow off top going into 2022. This would coincide with a Bitcoin top in December (following the previous tops of Dec 2013 and Dec 2017 ). Extrapolating this Dec 2021-Jan 2022 top theory, it could be suggested that Bitcoin tops out at $200k, giving half the return of the prior cycle in terms of percentage gain. With a $200k Bitcoin, and Chainlink valued around ~ .005 BTC it could be suggested that Chainlink would have a value around $1000 in USD.
The horizontal and vertical lines are used to mark the cycles Chainlink has gone through so far. In my opinion there has really only been one cycle so far (Aug 2017 - Aug 2020) with the newest cycle only just starting. Chainlink has a history of repeating prior price action but in a compressed manner (reference the commonly painted W prior to a large move). With the first cycle lasting ~1000 days I estimated that this current one would last around ~500 days (about ~450 in this model).
