The price of LINK, the token underpinning the decentralized oracle network Chainlink, has soared to a daily high of $8.86 on Wednesday, a level last seen on May 10.
Though a minor correction has brought LINK to $8.41 by press time, it still represents a solid increase of 10.42% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
This also makes Chainlink's token one of the best-performing assets in the last day as the broader crypto market continues to experience bouts of volatility.
With a market capitalization of over $3.9 billion, Chainlink is currently the industry's 21st-largest digital currency.
Chainlink Economics 2.0
LINK's latest price action follows the publication of its updated roadmap for the implementation of staking—a feature that would enable a system of rewards and penalties designed to incentivize the network's proper operation.
First outlined in an April 2021 white paper and followed by a January 2022 teaser, the idea of earning passive income through staking on Chainlink revolves around giving the ecosystem participants, such as node operators and community members, the ability to increase the security guarantees of oracle services by backing them with staked LINK tokens.
The initial implementation of Chainlink, called v0.1, is projected for the second half of 2022 and will mark the beginning of Chainlink Economics 2.0, the project's "new era of sustainable growth and security."
Pointing to the deep integration of Chainlink's oracles with leading crypto applications, the company said that "the increase in oracle security and user assurances brought about by staking will be key in helping the multi-chain smart contract economy scale to eventually secure multi-trillion-dollar markets across major global industries."
According to Chainlink, the rollout of the staking mechanism will be similar to the deployment of Chainlink Price Feeds—the company's popular price oracle network for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
The latter started with a single price feed for ETH/USD operated by three oracle nodes and grew to support almost a thousand price feeds powered by more than 50 node operators across twelve blockchains and layer-2 solutions.
Currently, Chainlink is trusted by some of the most valuable DeFi apps, including Aave, Compound, dYdX, Synthetix, Nexus Mutual, and more.
The most recent integration happened last week, with Solana adding support for Chainlink Price Feeds.
