
The Chainlink (LINK) network, a leading smart contract-oriented blockchain focused on bringing together the fragmented decentralized financial (DeFi) eco in a secure manner, has continued to attract the attention of most developers and investors.
The medium-capped altcoin has undeniably proved to be an important part of the mass adoption of web3 platforms and digital assets. According to our latest market data, the Chainlink network has a fully diluted valuation of about $15 billion and an average daily traded volume of around $1 billion.
Despite the impressive performance amid the largely illiquid crypto market, the Chainlink core development team has continued to build the proper infrastructure to enable mainstream adoption in the upcoming highly anticipated bull market.
The Chainlink network has been preparing to transition to a more inclusive dubbed the Chainlink Economics 2.0, which encompasses a new layer of cryptoecominc security. At the helm of Chainlink Economics 2.0 is the upgraded staking that entails an expanded staking pool size geared toward onboarding more users.
Last December, the Chainlink team released the initial beta version of its staking dubbed v0.1, which consisted of about 25 million LINK in the staking pool to support the security of the ETH/USD data feed on the Ethereum network. As a result, both community stakers and node operator stakers participated in the initial staking which has been described as a major success.
Moving forward from December 11, 2023, the Chainlink v0.2 is now available to all LINK holders with an expanded pool size of up to 45 million tokens. Notably, the Chainlink Staking v0.2 has been gradually introduced through the priority migration period that began on November 28 and the early access that kicked off on December 7.
Interestingly, the Chainlink Staking community pool is 100 percent filled with 40,975,000 LINK, whereby the network reported that more than 19 million LINK were staked in under 7 hours after the early access was opened.
The Chainlink team has been taking the security of the data feeds with utmost seriousness as its products are used as the core backbone of most DeFi projects such as OpenSea, Aave, and the Graph, among many others. Notably, the Chainlink eco has been conducting a competitive crowdsourced audit of the Chainlink Staking v0.2 codebase that began in August and features a prize pool of $250k.
Chainlink price has rallied more than 116 percent year-to-date to trade at