Chainlink Pushes Past $26 as Reserve Launch Sparks On-Chain Surge

Chainlink is showing strength. $LINK jumped above $26 this week, its highest level in seven months. The breakout turns eyes back on the token. (CoinMarketCap: $25.92, market cap $17.6B, circulating supply 678M LINK).

But the bigger story isn’t the price. It’s the on-chain pulse. On Sunday, 9,813 unique LINK addresses made a transfer. On Monday, 9,625 new wallets came online. Both are the highest daily totals of 2025. The activity proves demand is running deeper than charts.

Then August brought the news that changes the economics. The Chainlink Foundation rolled out the Chainlink Reserve. It’s an on-chain vault built to lock LINK and fuel network growth. The Reserve fills up through a simple process: enterprise and usage revenue is converted into LINK, then stored directly in the Reserve.

This is not tokenomics theater. Chainlink already generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from enterprises. Big players have been paying offchain for access to Chainlink services for years. Now that money creates real demand for LINK.

Here’s how it works:

– Banks, asset managers, or DeFi protocols use Chainlink.

– They pay fees.

– Those fees are converted into LINK on the open market.

– That LINK is locked in the Reserve.

It’s a structural buyback. No vague burn promises. No empty staking gimmicks. Real revenue, recycled into real token demand.

The Reserve is already stocked. Over 100,000 LINK now sits in it, worth more than $1M. And this is only weeks after launch. Imagine the flows once adoption hits scale.

Scale is not a dream. Chainlink is tied into the world’s largest financial rails. The partnership with SWIFT already connects 11,000 banks piloting tokenized settlement through Chainlink’s CCIP. Add ICE and other capital markets giants into the mix, and the flywheel builds itself. Every new contract, every settlement pilot, every institutional fee funnels more LINK into the Reserve.

This model makes LINK different. Instead of waiting for speculative waves, it now absorbs demand through real economic activity. Enterprise adoption becomes buy pressure. The token is no longer detached from the network’s usage.

Development activity backs the case. Santiment data shows Chainlink as crypto’s top Real World Asset (RWA) project by development since last month. That means the builders are shipping, not stalling. More commits, more updates, more infrastructure.