Bitcoin Starts the Week Flat, But Chainlink Is Flying—Here's Why — SkimNews
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Bottomline, a top-three SWIFT services provider processing more than $16 trillion in payments annually for 600-plus banks, announced a deal with Chainlink to connect its bank customers to public and private blockchain settlement via CCIP and CRE.
- LINK touched $13.64 on September 7, its highest price since January 18, gaining roughly 6.8% in 24 hours and outperforming every other top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap, with derivatives open interest hitting an 11-month high of $784 million.
- Chainlink's CCIP, live since July 2023 and spanning more than 60 blockchains, will move tokenized value across chains while CRE orchestrates routing and confirmations; banks continue sending standard ISO 20022 messages without new infrastructure, though no go-live date or pilot bank has been disclosed.
- SWIFT itself ran Chainlink interoperability experiments in 2023 with more than 10 institutions including Citi and BNY Mellon, and Standard Chartered last month set a $200 price target for LINK by 2030 citing Chainlink's $110 billion in secured value.
- Charles Schwab announced plans in late August to expand its retail crypto trading beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum to include Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink.
- LINK is up 57% over the past 30 days, while Bitcoin opened the week pinned below $80,000—down about 1%—after being rejected from $82,000 twice and slipping under its 50-week moving average near $81,000 lost back in May.
Why it matters: The Bottomline deal gives Chainlink a foothold inside the SWIFT-rails ecosystem without forcing banks to rebuild infrastructure, an under-discussed angle in coverage that frames this purely as an altcoin rally. With Standard Chartered's $200 price target and Schwab's retail listing pending, the same institutional channels that ignored crypto for years are now routing LINK exposure to both wholesale and retail customers.
Ask SkimNews
