Chainlink and the Banks: Why LINK Supply Outpaces Its Reserve

Chainlink has been chosen to connect banks to Swift’s new blockchain ledger, and it has worked with Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, UBS, Citi and BNY Mellon. Yet the LINK token sits more than 75% below its all-time high. A Bullrunners video argues the gap comes down to what banks actually hired Chainlink to do, and how fast new LINK supply is growing.

This matters beyond Chainlink. Many coins, XRP included, are sold on the idea that banks will plug in. With Chainlink, the banks really did plug in. So it is a clean test of a simple question: when big institutions use a network, does any of that reach the token in your wallet?

What is Chainlink and why do banks use it?

Chainlink is a network that brings outside information onto blockchains and moves assets between different blockchains. A blockchain cannot see anything outside itself. It doesn’t know the price of a Treasury bond, whether a dividend was declared, or what is happening on another chain. Chainlink feeds that information in, and its cross-chain product, called CCIP (Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol), moves assets between ledgers. For more background, see our explainer on what Chainlink is and the oracle problem.

That is the problem banks hit when they put assets on a blockchain. Each institution picks a different ledger, and those ledgers can’t talk to each other. According to the video, the institutional track record looks like this:

• Swift’s joint experiment: Citi, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, Euroclear, Clearstream, Lloyds, ANZ and DTCC tested moving tokenized assets between blockchains using Swift messages.
• UBS Asset Management: ran a pilot with Swift and Chainlink under Singapore’s Project Guardian, subscribing to and redeeming a tokenized fund with cash moving through Swift.
• Corporate actions: 24 institutions, including Swift, DTCC, Euroclear and UBS, built a system with Chainlink for dividends, stock splits and coupon payments, which banks still largely process by hand. Nadine Chakar, global head of DTCC Digital Assets, called it the furthest the industry has been in trying to solve corporate actions.
• DTCC production trades: in July, DTCC ran real trades using tokenized stocks and Treasuries with more than 30 firms involved. Chainlink is on the participant list.
• Swift’s ledger: per the video, 17 institutions are piloting tokenized deposits on Swift’s new ledger, with Chainlink picked to connect banks to it.

The video calls it as strong an institutional list as any crypto network has.

Does Swift’s blockchain ledger run on Chainlink?

No. Swift’s own blockchain ledger does not run on Chainlink. Swift announced a shared ledger for 24/7 cross-border payments last year, designed with more than 30 banks. According to the video, the word Chainlink isn’t in that announcement, the prototype was built with Consensys, and Swift has since said the ledger runs on Hyperledger Besu, a different technology.

Chainlink’s own announcement describes its role as connecting banks to that ledger, with this “orchestration” taking place “before final settlement.” Final settlement continues through existing mechanisms such as a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system, which is the system central banks already run for moving money between banks. Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov describes the software, called CRE, as the interface banks use to get into Swift’s ledger. We covered this in more depth in Chainlink and Swift’s ledger: what the CRE link means for LINK.

The video applies the same lens to the rest of the list:

• Swift’s write-up of the joint experiment says transfers of simulated tokenized assets took place.
• The 24-institution corporate actions system is a data system. It extracts, checks and publishes the record of a dividend or split. It fixes the record rather than moving the money.
• The DTCC trades were real, but DTCC’s release lists Chainlink as a participant without saying what it did. “Powered by Chainlink” is Chainlink’s wording, not DTCC’s.

The wider tokenization market fits the same pattern. The video cites RWA.xyz figures of more than $38 billion in real-world assets sitting on public blockchains, and more than $380 billion that is only “represented,” meaning an institution records it on a ledger it controls privately. More than eight in every ten dollars of that represented figure is one repo platform, Broadridge’s, on a private network called Canton. A private ledger that one institution controls doesn’t need an outside network to tell it what is true.

The video’s conclusion: banks kept the ledger and kept the settlement, and Chainlink got the connecting job in between. That is a real job, but a smaller one than many holders assumed.

How does the Chainlink Reserve connect bank money to LINK?

The Chainlink Reserve links payments for Chainlink’s services to buying LINK. For years, a bank could use Chainlink without owning a single LINK token. Chainlink has narrowed that gap with what it calls payment abstraction: a customer pays in whatever it wants (stablecoins, gas tokens, or ordinary money paid off-chain by an enterprise), and the system converts that payment into LINK.

That LINK goes into the Chainlink Reserve, launched last year, which buys and holds. In Chainlink’s words, “we do not expect any withdrawals from the reserve for multiple years.” According to the video:

• At the end of last year, the reserve held about 1.32 million LINK.
• It now holds about 6.12 million LINK, worth around $85 million, bought at an average of about $11.21 per token.
• It is still adding every week.

Usage is also growing. Chainlink reported about 4.9 billion moving through CCIP last quarter, up more than 350% from a year earlier. Chainlink also says its services have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, mostly from large enterprises paying off-chain. That is Chainlink’s own figure, and the breakdown has never been published. Our guide to five metrics for whether LINK captures Chainlink’s value covers how to read these numbers.

How much does Chainlink actually earn?

Per the video, Chainlink’s fee contract collected about $5.5 million over the last 30 days. That compares with a network valued at about $10.5 billion, or about $14.1 billion counting every LINK that exists. The video also warns that the revenue figure shown on DeFi Llama is the LINK moving into the reserve, so it should not be added on top of the reserve as a second source of demand. It is the same money, counted once.

Why is LINK supply growing faster than the reserve?

New LINK is entering circulation far faster than the reserve removes it. According to CoinGecko figures cited in the video:

Measure	End of last year	Now	Change
Circulating LINK	about 708 million	about 748 million	about +40 million
Chainlink Reserve	about 1.32 million	about 6.12 million	about +4.8 million

So in roughly nine months, about eight new LINK reached the market for every one LINK the reserve locked away. A large part arrived at once: in June, 21 million LINK moved out of wallets that Chainlink’s supply data tracks as node operators and company, about 3.4 times everything the reserve holds today. Around 252 million LINK have not entered circulation at all.

The video’s summary is that the buying mechanism is real and points in the right direction, but supply is currently arriving about eight times faster than the reserve absorbs it. The host notes LINK has risen about 75% from a low near $7 and suggests buyers may be returning to the bank story, while stating plainly that he doesn’t know where the price goes and nobody does.

Three things to check if you hold LINK

The video lays out a simple monthly framework for judging whether the bank story is starting to reach the token:

1. The ratio. The reserve publishes its balance and CoinGecko publishes circulating supply. Check both once a month. To match 40 million new LINK in nine months, the reserve would need to take in about 4.4 million LINK a month. It currently takes in a little over half a million, so inflows would need to grow about eight times just to stop circulating supply from rising.
2. A real revenue number. “Hundreds of millions” in enterprise revenue is a claim until Chainlink publishes a figure with a date attached. A published number would settle the valuation argument one way or the other.
3. DTCC’s own wording. According to the video, DTCC aimed to launch its tokenized service this month. If DTCC names Chainlink’s role in its own launch material, that would be the first time it has said for itself what Chainlink does.

The host adds general portfolio discipline: size any position on purpose, hold other things around it, and decide exits before the next headline decides them for you.

What to watch next

The broader lesson applies to any coin pitched on bank adoption: a bank logo is not the same as demand for a token. Our piece on whether bank money ever reaches the token applies the same test to other coins.

For Chainlink specifically, the video’s view is that the network has won the banks but has not yet turned that into enough demand for LINK to outrun its own supply. The numbers to follow are the reserve balance against circulating supply, any dated revenue disclosure from Chainlink, and how DTCC describes Chainlink when its tokenized service launches.