Chainlink’s retail investors gain traction as whale concentration falls

Chainlink has made quite a stir in the cryptocurrency world. Its native token, LINK, has been one of the best performing crypto-assets in 2020. In fact, LINK hit an all-time high on 4 March after the token climbed to $4.9. While the price did tumble down on Black Thursday,  a gradual rise thereafter has significantly recovered the gains that were previously lost.

Since its yearly low of 13 March, Bitcoin’s price has surged by a staggering 67%. However, it is LINK that has stolen the show, with the token having recorded gains of 131%. Interestingly, LINK’s supply on exchanges has been trending down since late last year. This suggests that people were buying, as well as withdrawing. According to Santiment’s latest insights, this essentially reduces a lot of the sell-pressure.

To top that, increased trading volume during this period has only propelled the price to go up, despite ongoing COVID-19 concerns.

Source: Santiment

Who is Hodling LINK?

According to Santiment’s findings, it is the retail group [100-1000 LINK] that has seen strong growth over the past couple of months, while those holding 1000- 100,000 LINK recorded a decline over the same period. Additionally, the whales, holding 100,000-1,000,000 LINK tokens, have significantly fallen as well.

At the time of writing, the concentration of whales stood at 67.82%, investors accounted for 12.32%, while the remaining 19.86 were retail holders. Lower the number of large holders, the more decentralized and widely distributed a crypto-asset is and vice-versa.

Source: Santiment | Holder Distribution

When the case of Chainlink is considered, it can be observed that it has a higher number of large holders, meaning this crypto-asset is more centralized and sparsely distributed. Further, LINK’s token supply continues to be centralized while the Chainlink team continues to hold a majority of its supply.

This trend might suggest a much healthier distribution of LINK tokens in the coming days, with the retail group garnering a strong and sizeable portion of the total supply.

Source: CryptoCompare

Besides, the Net Network Growth, which is essentially a momentum signal indicating the coin’s underlying network health by measuring the number of new addresses minus the addresses that have their balances emptied, was noted to be in the bullish zone with a signal value of positive 3.14%.