Chainlink spares no expense when it comes to development

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Written on Jul 3, 2020

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Chainlink plans to spend another 1 million LINK per month for incentivization of node operators.
On a yearly basis, the project is spending around $58 million, which is almost two times what ETH spends.
However, these efforts have paid off, as the project continues to advance, and its community is growing.

Chainlink (LINK) is once again showing that it will spare no expense when it comes to development. A recent report published by Flipside Crypto shows that the crypto project plans to spend around 1 million LINK coins per month for rewarding its node operators.

Based on the current LINK price — $4.83 — this means that the project aims to spend $4.83 million on its ecosystem development.

The amount is significantly greater than what Ethereum itself is planning to spend on development.

Chainlink pays 1 million LINK per month

The reason for this is rather simple — Chainlink is growing, and rapidly, at that. Researchers have found that node operators receive around 500,000 LINK tokens, twice per month, totaling in 1 million coins each month.

On a yearly basis, that is nearly $58 million. In comparison, Ethereum is expected to spend around $30 million per year on development, which is a significantly lower amount, even though ETH has a 15x larger market cap than LINK.

LINK’s approach to development allowed it to hit some major milestones, including the integration with Tezos (XTZ) and the Chinese Blockchain Service Network.

Furthermore, the project introduced verifiable on-chain randomness. This success and effort are also reflected in the LINK’s price, which is near its ATH. Some experts even predicted that LINK could hit $25 in the near future. For the moment, however, its price sits at $4.87.

The funds are coming from an unexpected wallet

One interesting thing is that the funds for the project’s node operators do not seem to be coming from the amount that was dedicated for this purpose after LINK’s ICO.

LINK held its ICO in 2017, when it raised $32 million. Around 35% of this was dedicated to the incentivization of node operators, which is around 350 million LINK.

For now, however, these token remain intact, while the funds for the operators seem to be arriving from a wallet that originally held 50 million LINK. The wallet currently still has around 31 million coins.

Lastly, the report also noted that the project is becoming more and more decentralized, and that its community is quite large and very active and engaged. For now, the majority of the token supply is still being used for speculation, however, this is expected to change in due time.