Chainlink — 3 Weeks Away From Emptying Dev Team WalletThere is approximately 4 Million LINK left on 1 of 6 publicly known Chainlink team wallets:
0xf37c348b7d19b17b29cd5cfa64cfa48e2d6eb8db
Four days ago, 1.5 Million LINK were transferred out. One week before that other 1.5 Million. And two weeks before that too. To put it simply, we’re 3 weeks away from emptying this wallet.
Ok but, what does that mean?
Token Distribution
Let’s begin to remember how the tokens have been distributed.
There is a maximum supply of 1 Billion tokens. This is the total number of LINK that will be ever created. This is still far from being the number of LINK in the circulating supply. As of today, there is only 408.5 Million LINK of circulating supply. That’s only~40.85% of the maximum supply.
On its ICO, this was how LINK was distributed:
35% to Node Operators
35% to the Public Token Sale
30% to the Company
So, 300 Millions LINK go to the company, in 6 publicly known Chainlink wallets with 50 Million LINK each (in 2017).
Those are the wallet addresses with the current LINK balance (obviously some with less than 50 Million now):
1. 0xf37c348b7d19b17b29cd5cfa64cfa48e2d6eb8db (4.09 Million)
2. 0xe0362f7445e3203a496f6f8b3d51cbb413b69be2 (50 Million)
3. 0x75398564ce69b7498da10a11ab06fd8ff549001c (50 Million)
4. 0x5560d001f977df5e49ead7ab0bdd437c4ee3a99e (50 Million)
5. 0xdad22a85ef8310ef582b70e4051e543f3153e11f (37.4 Million)
6. 0xbe6977e08d4479c0a6777539ae0e8fa27be4e9d6 (50 Million)
NB. For the sake of readability I’ve numbered the wallet addresses.
So the circulating supply has been increasing since 2017 with transactions mostly from Chainlink’s Team wallets 1 and 5 to other wallets (e.g. exchanges). Other wallets have stayed untouched with 50 Million each (vertical line in black). The last transaction out of the wallet 5 occurred August 2019 (vertical line in blue) and to this day it has 37.4 Million LINK. The wallet 1 has been the more active and has still 4.09 Million LINK (vertical line in orange) and if we keep the same rate of the previous weeks, we’re 3 weeks away from emptying this wallet (dotted vertical line in orange).
They have been selling from Wallet 1 in 1 week intervals (Fridays). There are 2 to 3 transactions of half a million LINK each in one day and again 1 week after that, at least for the past few weeks. So after the wallet is emptied, the longer it gets without them moving LINK from one of the their wallets, the more significant the case for price going up (i.e. reducing supply).
I'm expecting Wallet 1 to be emptied on March 12th but they could just sell all of the remaining LINK sooner on any Friday. So watch out for the following days:
February 26 (They could move everything left in one go here)
March 5 (…or here)
March 12 (if same frequency is kept, that would be the date)
Who knows what will happen?
Let’s entertain the idea for a moment that they do stop selling for some time. This is one of those cases, where the why they would do that becomes less important than for how long. Wouldn’t you say that 50 Million+ LINK would be enough to support the development of the Chainlink protocol for some time? We’re most probably 3 weeks away from emptying the wallet, and 4 weeks away to find out what comes next. And if this happens, it helps the case for upward movement.
