Today Chainlink (LINK) surpassed Binance Coin (BNB) and Litecoin (LTC) in market capitalization. Data from CoinMarketCap shows LINK’s market cap surged to $2.86 billion as the price rallied 9% to $8.17. This brought the market cap above BNB and LTC whose market capitalization sits at $2.84 billion and $2.83 billion respectively.
Although LINK price did not break its previous all-time high of $8.22, it surged 14% in the last 24 hours and at the time of writing the altcoin trades for $8.17.
To date, LINK has been one of the best performing cryptocurrencies of 2020 and 2019, having rallied 2,536% since its launch in September 2017 at $0.14.
LINK’s impressive rally is potentially connected to the growth of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) industry as Chainlink oracles help support various networks and investors can also earn interest by staking their coins at a number of DeFi platforms.
LINK is also one of the highest yielding coins on popular lending protocol, Aave, and this could also be boosting demand for the altcoin.
Interest over time for the term “Chainlink”. Source: Google Search Trends
Data from Google Trends also shows that queries for the keyword “Chainlink” rose to a score of 100 in the last week. This is more than double the score of the previous week and further re-enforces the fact that higher search and Tweet volume are connected to the spot prices of many cryptocurrencies.
Chainlink daily price chart. Source: Coin360
As Bitcoin price continues to consolidate below the $9,300 level, many altcoins are continuing to post noticeable gains. Tezos (XTZ) gained 4.3%, Ontology (ONT) rallied 13.78% and Dogecoin (DOGE) added 5.32%.
According to CoinMarketCap, the overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $273.5 billion and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is 62.3%.
