Adam “Link” Smith

95%+ of the worlds largest investors have zero exposure to $LINK but ~70% of all $LINK is already owned and ~4.2% of all $LINK is already staked

now that $LINK is officially classified as a digital commodity CLL can feel comfortable driving more value to the token without worries of $LINK being deemed a security

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan explains the reason $LINK tokenomics have been so constrained up until now “There’s a good reason why the economic alignment with the token is complex and that reason is named Gary Gensler. He made it illegal for there to be a direct economic tie” now that $LINK is officially classified as a digital commodity Chainlink Labs can feel comfortable green lighting its full economics roadmap (Chainlink Economics 2.0)

many of the best investments in history required long-term orientation Amazon started out selling books and the stock took 10 years to recover from dot com peak. Tesla started out selling a singular sports car model and the stock traded relatively sideways for 10 years after IPO the great thing is that once these once in a decade type of companies become understood by the masses, the repricing comes quick and aggressively so Chainlink has spent years going from a single product to now a decentralized services computing platform. at the same time $LINK has lagged other assets. i view this as an opportunity, with the token being one of the best asymmetric bets in the market

“The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation.” — Seth Klarman

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan explains the reason $LINK tokenomics have been so constrained up until now “There’s a good reason why the economic alignment with the token is complex and that reason is named Gary Gensler. He made it illegal for there to be a direct economic tie” now that $LINK is officially classified as a digital commodity Chainlink Labs can feel comfortable green lighting its full economics roadmap (Chainlink Economics 2.0)

I believe the bull case for $LINK is straightforward, I would distill the thesis down to: 1. Chainlink continues to expand its dominant market share as the critical infra platform powering the most important crypto use cases (institutional DeFi, RWA tokenization, prediction markets, stablecoins, etc) 2. Growing demand for Chainlink's data, interop, privacy, compliance, & orchestration services leads to increasing demand for LINK tokens (native payments, programmatic buybacks, staking collateral, etc) 3. LINK is a digital commodity whose total supply is capped at 1 billion, meaning when growing demand combined with expanding supply sinks outpaces available on-market supply → buyers must raise their bids to find a willing seller 4. All 1 billion LINK tokens can only be acquired from someone who already owns it, no new units can be printed → demand-drive scarcity becomes an inherent property of the asset In short, the thesis is that $LINK becomes increasingly scarce as the value that the Chainlink platform generates is captured by the token Naturally, this story will need to prove itself over time, job's not done But the hardest part is not perfecting the economics today (this can always be fine-tuned), it's becoming the indispensable industry standard whose value is unquestionable. The economics will naturally flow from there As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it at Chainlink's SmartCon 2022: "Give me a hundred million users, and I will find a way to monetize them"

Chainlink Economics 2.0. Study it.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan explains the reason $LINK tokenomics have been so constrained up until now “There’s a good reason why the economic alignment with the token is complex and that reason is named Gary Gensler. He made it illegal for there to be a direct economic tie” now that $LINK is officially classified as a digital commodity Chainlink Labs can feel comfortable green lighting its full economics roadmap (Chainlink Economics 2.0)

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan explains the reason $LINK tokenomics have been so constrained up until now “There’s a good reason why the economic alignment with the token is complex and that reason is named Gary Gensler. He made it illegal for there to be a direct economic tie” now that $LINK is officially classified as a digital commodity Chainlink Labs can feel comfortable green lighting its full economics roadmap (Chainlink Economics 2.0)

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan explains the reason $LINK tokenomics have been so constrained up until now “There’s a good reason why the economic alignment with the token is complex and that reason is named Gary Gensler. He made it illegal for there to be a direct economic tie” now that $LINK is officially classified as a digital commodity Chainlink Labs can feel comfortable green lighting its full economics roadmap (Chainlink Economics 2.0)

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan on Chainlink: “If you talk to the average institutional investor they’ve never heard of Chainlink” “If Chainlink were a software company in a traditional C-corp wrapper, it would be one of the hottest tech plays in the market right now” Historically, the best investments were the ones few understood at the time, yet had enormous market opportunities To me the information asymmetry around $LINK is what makes it such an asymmetric bet