Chainlink hits eight-month high as open interest rises to $784 million

Chainlink (LINK) reached $13.64 on September 7, its highest level since January 18, 2026. At the same time, open interest in derivatives contracts reached approximately $784 million, its highest level since October 2025, according to CoinGlass data. The move is significant: LINK has nearly doubled since June 22. However, it is not without contradictions, with some whales taking profits and ETF flows noticeably weaker this week.

Chainlink gains 94% from its June low

LINK has come a long way. Between June 22 and September 7, its price rose by approximately 94%, climbing from around $7 to an intraday high of $13.64. This was the first time in nearly eight months that Chainlink had returned to these levels.

The rise came a few days after Bref Crypto detailed the integration of US economic data into Chainlink. Real GDP, PCE inflation and domestic demand can now be delivered to smart contracts on ten blockchains.

The price move nevertheless remains well below the euphoria of 2021. LINK’s all-time high stands at around $52.88, reached in May 2021. At $13.64, the token was still approximately 74% below that peak.

Its market capitalization now stands at nearly $10 billion, with approximately 748 million LINK in circulation out of a total supply capped at one billion tokens. Available data also showed nearly $1 billion in 24-hour futures volume in its latest readings.

The rebound is therefore significant. It has not yet returned Chainlink to the excesses of its previous cycle.

Open interest reaches its highest level since October 2025

The most interesting figure may come from derivatives.

LINK open interest reached approximately $784 million, up from around $683 million at the end of August. This represents the total value of futures contracts that remain open and unsettled. In other words, the indicator measures the capital committed to positions that are still active.

When open interest rises alongside the price, it can signal the arrival of new speculative capital. However, it does not by itself indicate whether that capital is betting on a rise or a decline.

That is precisely what makes the current situation interesting.

Derivatives volume exceeded $1 billion at the peak. More recently, available data showed nearly $991 million in 24-hour futures volume, compared with just $215 million on the spot market. Derivatives therefore accounted for more than four times the spot volume recorded during that window.

This gap adds nuance to the rally: the rise is not being driven solely by spot purchases. A significant amount of leverage is now accompanying LINK.

That can amplify a continuation of the move. It can also make a correction more severe.

Short sellers have already paid part of the price rise

Traders’ positioning provides a few additional indications.

Other data recorded on Sunday showed that derivatives volumes had risen sharply and that shorts accounted for approximately 85% of LINK liquidations during part of the rally. The price increase has therefore already forced some sellers to buy back their positions.

The mechanism is fairly simple. A trader who shorts LINK with leverage is betting on a decline. If the price rises far enough, their collateral no longer covers the position. The exchange automatically closes it by buying LINK.

These forced purchases can accelerate the rise.

However, this phenomenon is not enough to explain a rally of nearly 94% since June. Open interest remains high after the liquidations, meaning that new positions continue to be opened.

The ratio between $784 million in open interest and a market capitalization close to $10 billion represents approximately 8% of LINK’s market value. This is not a perfect comparison—one measures contracts, while the other measures tokens in circulation—but it illustrates the size now reached by the asset’s derivatives market.

LINK has therefore once again become a market where leverage can have a major impact on daily moves.

A whale sends 2.41 million LINK to Coinbase

Not everyone is using the rally to increase their positions.

According to On-Chain Lens data, a large address transferred 2.41 million LINK to Coinbase over three weeks, worth an estimated $26 million at the time of the transfers.

A transfer to an exchange does not automatically amount to a sale. An address may move funds for several reasons. The market nevertheless generally interprets this type of transaction as a potential increase in the supply available for sale.

This is a useful nuance in the context of the surge in open interest.

Futures traders are increasing their exposure at a time when at least one major address appears to be moving its LINK closer to an exchange’s liquidity. Speculative pressure and profit-taking can therefore coexist.

The price itself already offers a glimpse of this. After reaching $13.64, LINK fell back to around $13.20 in the data reviewed on September 7. Nothing unusual after such a rapid rally, but enough to remind us that the eight-month high has not yet been turned into a new support zone.

Derivatives are highly active. Long-term holders, meanwhile, do not all appear willing to wait.

Chainlink ETFs are not yet following the price

Another contradiction is that Wall Street is not participating in the move with the same intensity.

According to SoSoValue data, Chainlink-related ETF products recorded no net inflows between August 31 and September 4. Over the same period, Bitcoin ETFs absorbed approximately $986 million and Ethereum ETFs $218 million.

August had been better for LINK, with approximately $18.27 million in inflows, its best monthly performance since December 2025.

Institutional participation is therefore not nonexistent. It is simply much more modest than the current strength of the derivatives market.

The products themselves are real, however. The prospectus for the Grayscale Chainlink Trust ETF filed with the SEC states that the fund directly holds LINK and aims to track its value, less fees. As of December 31, 2025, this vehicle alone held approximately 0.9% of LINK’s circulating supply.

Other products also exist, including the Volatility Shares Chainlink ETF launched in April 2026.

Distribution is also expanding: Charles Schwab is now preparing direct access to LINK for its approximately 39 million brokerage accounts.

Wall Street is therefore present. For now, however, it is not the main explanation for September’s acceleration.

Chainlink’s fundamentals have also reached a new scale

Reducing the rally to the charts would nevertheless overlook an important part of the story.

According to Chainlink’s official metrics, the network now reports $33.34 trillion in Transaction Value Enabled, or TVE, as of the end of August. This metric adds up the value of transactions using its oracles. The network also reports $48.32 billion in Total Value Secured and nearly 19.68 billion verified messages.

These figures require precision: $33.34 trillion does not mean that Chainlink holds or generates that amount. TVE is a cumulative flow indicator facilitated by the oracles, not value locked in the protocol.

This is much more meaningful than the viral figure of “$34 trillion processed” when it is presented without explanation.

Chainlink essentially serves as an interface between blockchains and information they cannot access on their own: an asset’s price, a stablecoin’s reserves, a fund’s net asset value, an economic statistic or a message from another network.

This role becomes particularly important with tokenization. A smart contract representing a US bond may exist on Ethereum; it still needs financial data from the outside world to operate correctly.

That is precisely the space Chainlink is seeking to occupy.

Washington is already using Chainlink for economic data

Adoption is no longer coming solely from DeFi protocols.

The US Department of Commerce began publishing official GDP data on several blockchains in August 2025 and distributing it through Chainlink and Pyth. According to the US government, this was the first publication of federal economic statistics of this kind directly on a blockchain.

Since then, Chainlink has notably distributed real GDP and certain PCE data to smart contracts.

This integration is interesting because it better explains the network’s value proposition than the performance of the LINK token alone. A blockchain cannot spontaneously query a database maintained by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. An oracle exists precisely to bridge that gap.

Wyoming has added another building block. The state’s official stablecoin, Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), uses Chainlink CCIP as its exclusive cross-chain infrastructure following a security review. In early September, the Wyoming Stable Token Commission also adopted Chainlink Proof of Reserve to publish data on the reserves backing FRNT.

This is no longer simply native DeFi.

A federal department and a US state government are now using different components of Chainlink.

The price can of course diverge from these fundamentals for months. The infrastructure, meanwhile, continues to expand.

More than $15 billion in assets have migrated to CCIP

Another recent development helps measure this change in scale.

According to Chainlink, infrastructure representing more than $15 billion in value has migrated to its CCIP interoperability protocol in recent months. This includes BitGo’s WBTC, Kraken Wrapped Bitcoin and Wyoming’s FRNT stablecoin.

BitGo chose CCIP as the exclusive cross-chain infrastructure for WBTC and its future assets, representing more than $7.7 billion according to Chainlink’s published estimate. Kraken made a comparable choice for kBTC and its future wrapped assets.

Another factor makes the current rally more interesting: LINK is returning to an eight-month high just as its infrastructure recovers assets previously secured by other cross-chain solutions.

The recent security environment surrounding bridges makes this issue particularly sensitive. Just days after several major incidents involving blockchain infrastructure, the ability to move assets between networks without adding a difficult-to-control point of failure has become a tangible commercial argument.

Chainlink obviously does not guarantee that no incident will occur. Its own interest, moreover, is to present CCIP as a safer infrastructure.

The migrations themselves are verifiable.

The token is also beginning to capture part of the revenue

Chainlink adoption has not always created an obvious relationship between network usage and demand for LINK. This is a long-standing criticism of the economic model.

The project is now seeking to strengthen that link through the Chainlink Reserve.

The mechanism converts part of the revenue from on-chain services and corporate payments into LINK. In the second quarter of 2026, the reserve accumulated more than 1.44 million LINK, bringing its total to approximately 4.5 million tokens.

This is in addition to more than 42 million LINK staked, according to Chainlink’s published economic metrics. Circulating supply exceeds 748 million units.

This mechanism does not turn every new partnership into an immediate, massive market purchase. That would be an overly simplistic interpretation.

It nevertheless creates a more direct link between the commercial use of Chainlink services and the token that powers the network’s economy.

This is an important development when assessing LINK over several years. The historic partnership between Chainlink, Fidelity and Sygnum had already shown in 2024 how oracles could support tokenized finance. In 2026, the model is also beginning to explore how that adoption can flow back to LINK itself.

The $13.50 area remains a test, not a promise

Several technical analyses highlight different targets, including $15.83 based on a double-bottom pattern and $22 in an X analyst’s scenario. For Bref Crypto, these figures should remain in their proper context: technical scenarios, not information or price promises.

The immediately observable level is around $13.50.

LINK approached and briefly exceeded it, reaching $13.64. On the weekly timeframe, a technical analysis also identifies a 200-week exponential moving average around $12.85. Holding above this zone would provide greater substance to the structural shift observed since June.

Conversely, a return below this average would reduce the technical significance of the breakout. The $10 area then remains a former psychological level and a consolidation zone visible in the analysis.

These are levels to monitor, not recommendations.

After a 94% gain in less than three months, the question is no longer simply how high LINK can go. It is also necessary to examine what is actually supporting the rise.

On this point, the data is unusual: open interest is at its highest level since October, futures are highly active, institutional adoption is advancing, but on-chain profit-taking is taking place and ETFs remain relatively quiet this week.

The LINK market has become much hotter than institutional flows.

Chainlink must now turn adoption into lasting demand

Chainlink is reaching an interesting point in its cycle.

The price has returned to its highest level since January. Open interest is back at an 11-month high. Regulated financial products are multiplying, Charles Schwab is preparing direct access to the token, the United States is publishing economic data through its oracles, and Wyoming is using CCIP and Proof of Reserve for its stablecoin.

These are much more solid facts than a price target published on X.

The contradiction is nevertheless real. ETFs attracted no net capital during the first week of September, a whale sent 2.41 million LINK to Coinbase, and futures volumes far exceeded spot trading. The rally therefore contains a significant speculative component.

Put differently, Chainlink’s fundamentals are advancing while leverage is running ahead of them.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It mainly means that the next phase will distinguish short-term enthusiasm from a more durable revaluation of the network.

At $13, LINK remains far below its 2021 record. The Chainlink infrastructure, meanwhile, is much more developed than it was at that time: nearly 20 billion verified messages, more than $33 trillion in enabled transaction value, government integrations and an increasingly clear presence in traditional finance.

The price guarantees nothing about what comes next.

But to understand why LINK is appearing on traders’ screens again today, looking only at its chart would mean missing half the story.

Key takeaways

• LINK reached $13.64 on September 7, its highest level since January, after gaining approximately 94% since June 22.
• Open interest reached $784 million, its highest level since October 2025, with derivatives volume exceeding $1 billion at the peak.
• Chainlink is also reporting $33.34 trillion in enabled transaction value while strengthening integrations with public- and institutional-sector players.
• The rise remains mixed, with profit-taking and no net inflows into LINK ETFs between August 31 and September 4.