Chainlink at $100? What LINK Would Need Beyond Bank Headlines

The company that settles Wall Street stock trades called the DTCC picked a crypto network named Chainlink to help run a new system for moving money and bonds between banks around the clock. And that system hasn't even gone live yet. Then a company that handles payments on Swift, the network banks use to send money across borders, gave more than 600 of its bank customers a way to settle payments through Chainlink. Chainlink also built a connection that lets banks plug into Swift's own new blockchain ledger. So while those deals line up, Chainlink's coin LINK more than doubled from seven in June to over $15 during Swift's yearly banking conference in Miami Beach at the end of September.

Since then, it's given back about a quarter of that price. And at the time of recording this video, it's sitting around 1180. So was this whole run-up just hype or was it a legit move because banks and institutions are getting behind it. So if you hold Chainlink or you're thinking about buying it, that answer matters because the DTCC's new system still hasn't gone live. And by the end of this video, you'll see what could happen to LINK when it does.

And if you understand that before it happens, it can make you real money on this token. You'll also see what would have to go wrong for LINK to slide back to $7 like it did in June. So if you're here to build real wealth, protect what's yours, and be the one to change your family's future, hit the subscribe button and comment bullish below. Also, I'm giving away our 2026 altcoin trading strategies and crypto yield generation brief to everyone who follows us on Instagram at Bull Runners. The official link will be in the description below this video.

Now, let's run it.

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Welcome back to the channel Bull Runners. If you're new here, my name is Paul and you can find me on X or Twitter @cryptopaul. Now, a lot of the coverage since Cybo says the banks already run on Chainlink. And if that were literally true, a $100 price target wouldn't sound that crazy at all. There are about 767 million Chainlink in circulation today.

So at 100 a coin, Chainlink would be worth around $77 right now and close to what all of XRP is worth today. While just getting back to its old high of 5270 would mean Link quadrupled from here. Big price targets get thrown around all the time. And the quickest way to test any of them is to multiply the target by the number of coins and ask who's actually going to pay that price for all of it. With Chainlink, the answer would have to be the banks.

So what really counts is how much they're doing with it. What the banks actually did is a lot earlier than those headlines make it sound. Swift built its own blockchain ledger, and Chainlink wants to be the front door banks walk through to reach it, which Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov spelled out himself on the very first day of Sibos. Swift is the messaging network banks used to tell each other where money goes, and most crypto holders have heard its name in every this changes everything video for years. In August, HSBC and Standard Chartered sent the first live payment across Swift's new ledger using digital versions of their own bank deposits, and neither bank needed a single crypto coin to do it.

So the front door is open, and the banks still have to walk through it. Bottom line, 600 banks are in the same spot because each one decides for itself whether to send any money down that new road, and nobody's given a date for when the first ones will. The DTCC deal in Miami was a demonstration of a repo, which works a lot like a pawn shop for big banks, where one bank hands over bonds, takes cash for the night, and buys the bonds back in the morning. Big banks do that every single day in one of the largest money markets anywhere. And what the crowd in Miami saw was the kind of deal running across blockchains on stage as a showcase.

The DTCC did run its first live tokenized trades with Chainlink's help back in July, but the full service for the rest of Wall Street still hasn't opened. Even when all of that goes live, Link still doesn't automatically move, and that's the real reason it couldn't hold $15 recently, or the fact that it's not higher right now. A lot of people say Chainlink is great technology with a token nobody actually needs, and honestly, they've got a point. crypto.news wrote about exactly this back in June, and it's true. The banks don't have to buy Link, and what makes it worse is the supply side. On June 20th, about 18.4 million Link left the wallets where Chainlink keeps its unreleased coins and landed on Binance within hours as a part of a release of new coins that come around every few months.

So, the banks don't have to buy Link, and new coins keep landing on exchanges creating more supply, which means if there is no demand to meet that supply, price tends to go down. But, there's one buyer that's tied straight to the money banks pay Chainlink, and it's been buying every week since the summer of 2025. It's called the Chainlink Reserve, and it works like a savings jar where a shop owner drops part of every day's takings, except this jar only ever holds Chainlink, and the owner has promised not to open it for years. Now, whenever a bank or an app pays Chainlink for its services, even in plain dollars, part of that money gets wrapped into Link, and the coins go straight into that jar. It never sold a single coin since it started, and its balance only goes one way, which is up.

Today, the reserve holds about 6.3 million Link, and it paid an average price of 11.25 a token for all of it. So, Link trades only a little above the average price that the Chainlink fund itself has been paying. This fund buys every Thursday, and it spends about the same amount each time, a little over a million dollars. When Chainlink sank to around seven at the end of June, that money bought about 154,000 coins in a single week. And on October 15th, LINK was trading around $12.

So, that same amount of money only bought 89,000 tokens. The reserve made its first buys in August of last year at 17 to 25 per coin. Then it watched LINK lose more than half of its value. And it's still in profit today because it kept spending the same amount every single week and picked up the most coins when everyone else was too scared to touch them. They bought when there was blood in the streets.

At the end of June, anyone who bought LINK at $18 was down by more than half and being told the token was useless. And that was exactly the week the reserve picked up more coins than in any other week this year. It's still a small floor though, around 300 million of LINK trades on an average day. So, the reserve buys about one out of every $2,000 that changes hands in a single week. And that June move to Binance was worth about 145 million, which is close to 2 and 1/2 years of Thursdays of landing on one exchange within a few hours.

So, the reserve isn't going to carry LINK to $100 on its own, but it does have a plan for its worst weeks. Whereas most people buying crypto don't have a plan at all. And that plan doesn't need a single bank announcement to work because it was set long before any of the bad weeks showed up. Our research team digs into this kind of thing on every coin before it moves. And that's how they put Ondo on our pick sheet at about 37 cents back in July.

More than 2 months before the BlackRock news hit. And it ran 60% into that September high. And a few weeks ago, Chainlink plugged into a network a lot of long-time crypto holders know well. At the end of September, Chainlink's price data went live on Stellar. The network Jed McCaleb started after he helped create Ripple, which makes it about the oldest rival XRP has.

Stellar's lending apps and prediction markets need live prices to work. So, now they get them from Chainlink. The same way banks connecting to Swift's new ledger and the DTCC's new collateral system are all lining up to use it. At that same Sibos, Nazarov told a panel on AI that the new on-chain system for cash, stocks, and funds will be really easy for AI agents to use. Software can't open a bank account, so it's going to need crypto rails to pay for anything.

And that's one more set of rails Chainlink wants to sit in the middle of. That said, this doesn't mean it takes anything away from other big networks or block chains. It just means Chainlink is in a really strong position to win a lot of business. And what Chainlink is betting on is selling the connections between all of them. Kind of being like a little middleman that has one of the best technologies in all of crypto.

Either way, it should show up in price if this was always the case, but sometimes it doesn't. A lot of people have been told that once the banks adopt a coin, the price takes care of itself. Matter of fact, most YouTube channels or channels that pitch hype have pushed that story for years because it's easy to get clicks. However, Chainlink is probably the cleanest test of that story anywhere in crypto because the banks really did start plugging into Chainlink. And links back to around $11.80 with the reserve doing the majority of the buying.

So adoption doesn't carry a coin unless there's real demand for the token behind it. And buying any coin just to wait for a bank headline to do the work of pushing the price up is probably the riskiest way to play in crypto. So whatever coin you're looking at, the thing worth watching is whether real money is buying the token. We're not talking just about a headline. So what would actually have to happen for LINK to get anywhere near 100?

And what would you do while you wait to find out? For Chainlink to get anywhere close to 100, the money banks pay Chainlink would have to grow until those Thursday buys are many times bigger than they are today. Or we need to see a crazy amount of buying. And it probably couldn't just be retail, it'd probably have to be institutional. Which means they would need a reason to be buying.

And to top it all off, this buying would need to be greater than the amount of new coins consistently hitting the market. Either way, some really cool things are happening for Chainlink. The DTCC already ran its first live tokenized trades in July. And at Sibos, Nadine Chakar said it hopes to open its tokenization service around the end of October, give or take a couple of weeks. And in the same conversation, she said she expects adoption to be slow.

We hope to go into production towards the end of October, give or take a couple of weeks here and there, but I believe, uh, much to my chagrin, that adoption will be slow, but it'll be methodical and progressive.

Then on October 29th, Chainlink holds Link NYC, a one-day event in New York for banking and stock market leaders. Watch what the reserve buys in the weeks after both, because larger amounts of accumulation would mean someone's actually paying for all of those connections that Chainlink is making. Right now, it's about 1.1 million a week, which we've covered, and it's stayed in a tight range most of this year. So, let's say that number started to climb to like 2 million, and then maybe even 5 million. This would mean that the banks have finally started paying for the token because of what it's doing.

And Chainlink's own dashboard will show it weeks before anyone puts it on a YouTube thumbnail. Either way, Chainlink lost almost half of its value between August of last year and this June. During the same stretch that the DTCC picked Chainlink for its new collateral system. So, it's obvious that really good headlines don't always do something positive for the price, which means you can't trade a headline, and you can't expect a headline to be bullish at all. Because when you really think about it, the people that piled into Chainlink after that big Swift headline about a year ago, sat around and found out the hard way that headlines aren't going to move your token.

And until the reserve's numbers start climbing, the most useful thing anyone can take from Chainlink is the way its own treasury buys. If LINK belongs in your portfolio, you pick the total amount while you're calm. You don't wait until you're panicking or FOMOing. Then it's probably best you dollar cost average or spread your buys out over weeks and months with the same dollar amount each time so you don't get too emotional because you bought way more here or there. It's also important to note that it doesn't need to be the only token in your portfolio.

It can sit next to your other coins that you might have some conviction in. That way you're protected and hedged in the case that something doesn't work out in those other coins or even in Chainlink this year. And if you do buy LINK, it can also be staked, which means locking it up to help secure the network in return for rewards, which is essentially a cool way to say that you generate yield for staking your token. And sometimes just having a plan is an edge. In the case of the Chainlink Reserve, that's their edge.

It doesn't matter if it's a good week, it doesn't matter if it's a bad week. They still buy and they don't make decisions when they're in panic mode. There is no such thing as panic mode because every Thursday Chainlink, through this reserve, buys the LINK token. Good news or bad news. Now, that's just one strategy, but our research team works too because they make their calls before the headlines, not after them.

Back in January of 2025, they flagged Hyperliquid as a new high-cap gem at 2690 and now it's close to 80 to dollars as I film this video, which is almost three X higher. And on September 27th, we posted HBAR for our members at about 9.6 cents, the exact night before it climbed 30% in a day. Our members have been getting results like Albert, who's up over $6,500 on his NEAR. And one member told us she was full of fear before she joined. And a month later, she was holding a coin that had gone up 300%.

Now, these results, of course, aren't typical, but that's why we say don't be typical. Crypto is obviously risky, so it's important you do your own research, But, that's why you have us on your side. Inside our private intelligence network, you get the team's picks before this channel ever covers them, plus live calls on when you can buy and when you can take profit on all of the tokens inside of your wallet. So, if you're looking at LINK or any other coin right now, and you'd rather have a plan before the next big headline instead of after it hits, click the very first link in the description and watch the free brief. And if it makes sense, go ahead and book a call with our team.

It's no harm, no foul. This isn't some high-pressure sales pitch. If it's not the right fit for you, we'll let you know straight up. Either way, you're going to walk away with a heck of a lot more clarity. That much I can guarantee.

So, if you're on mobile, be sure to click on that more button right down below this video to find that link. Or, the description below will give you that link as well. But, that is it for the video, folks. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, be sure to subscribe to the channel.

And as always, you know what to do. Stay bullish. Goodbye.