The market didn’t start too well this year due to the plans of the Fed, but one particular crypto wasn’t bothered too much by the bad news. That’s because its co-founder and figurehead Sergey Nazarov gave a lengthy presentation on January 1st.

Today we are going to take a look at Chainlink and what kept investors’ expectations high during the last week despite the fact that the market was building bearish momentum.

Chainlink oracles are booming

Chainlink is a very special crypto project since it provides infrastructure that is linked to the economy of decentralized finance. Many protocols depend on so-called oracles in order to receive reliable market data and price feeds. An oracle allows retrieving data that lies outside a blockchain and prevents that faulty data becomes part of a blockchain ecosystem.

The oracle networks of Chainlink have become very successful over the last two years and it seems that they could expand in the near future. Banks who are looking to build smart contracts and companies seeking to improve their supply-chain management through this technology are only two more use-cases that could add additional value and make use of Chainlinks technology. The team behind Chainlink is also providing valuable infrastructure which makes it highly likely that Chainlink will onboard companies in 2022 that will make use of blockchain technology outside the DeFi cosmos.

Staking is coming in 2022

The Chainlink community had to wait quite some time for staking and even though Nazarov announced that it will be available this year there is still no roadmap or release date. Usually staking is part of network consensus and block production and in the process, the stakers receive a block reward similar to the miners.

But Chainlink isn’t producing new blocks but rather ensuring that the data that is distributed through the oracle networks is correct and reliable. This requires not only a different form of consensus but also a different model for token distribution and rewards.

In his presentation, Nazarov outlined that a part of the oracles has become profitable on their own, which seems to be an important factor why Chainlink is moving forward with its plans to introduce staking this year. Staking will be available to many different interest groups in the network, among them node operators but also retail investors.

Both factors got investors excited and the LINK price rose in the first week of the new year. However, with more bearish momentum building up in the market as a whole it remains to be seen if the current rally is going to continue.