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Points of Focus
- Chainlink whale transactions hit a five-month high on Aug. 12.
- LINK trades at $8.7643, pressing against its 200-day averages.
- Wallets holding 100,000-10 million LINK now control 46.57% of the supply.
Chainlink (LINK) trades at $8.7643, down 0.07% on the day, per TradingView data at the time of writing.
The daily candle opened at $8.7706, reached a high of $8.8115, dipped to a low of $8.6752, and closed at $8.7600, a tight range that leaves price parked almost exactly where it has spent the past several weeks.
LINK presses against its longest-dated resistance as whales pile in
Santiment recorded 246 transactions above $100,000 in a 24-hour window, LINK’s highest daily count in five months, coinciding with wallets holding between 100,000 and 10 million tokens growing their combined share of supply to 46.57%, or 466.31 million coins.
🔗 Live Chart: https://t.co/5wlYZ9x9jz
🐳 Chainlink whale activity has seen a significant spike. The network saw 246 separate $100K+ LINK transactions in 24 hours, its highest daily level in 5 months.
📈 This coincides with the fact that wallets holding 100K to 10M LINK now… pic.twitter.com/1EACyuTF1O
— Santiment Intelligence (@SantimentData) August 12, 2026
Santiment called these holders “a nice key alpha indicator,” noting they have historically moved close to price.
This whale surge lands the same week Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick set a $200 LINK price target for 2030, a call built on Chainlink’s role in settling tokenized assets for institutions, including the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, UBS, and S&P Global. Whether the buying tracks that thesis or is simply positioning ahead of it is not yet answerable from the flow data alone.
The MA stack flips bullish beneath a stretched RSI
Eleven of the 14 moving averages (MAs) TradingView tracks for LINK now sit below the spot price as support, with the Ichimoku Base Line neutral at $8.3915. Only the 200-day exponential moving average (EMA) at $9.5498 and the 200-day simple moving average (SMA) at $8.8342 remain overhead, and the nearer of the two is just $0.0699, or 0.8%, above the current price.
That is an unusually thin gap for a level LINK has not closed above since its slide from the $20 range last year. Beneath the spot price, the MAs are clustered tightly, with 10 separate averages packed between $8.09 and $8.65, meaning a pullback would find layered support rather than open air. The Hull MA (9) at $8.6399 sits closest, just 1.4% below the price.
The oscillators tell a more stretched story than the MA stack does. The relative strength index (RSI) reads 61.72, still short of overbought, but the Stochastic %K at 85.36 and Williams Percent Range at -5.49 both sit deep in territory that typically precedes a cooling-off period. The average directional index (ADX), at 15.10, stays below the 20 threshold that marks a trending market, meaning the move has outrun its own momentum confirmation.
Whale buying meets its first real technical test
The setup is a genuine test rather than a formality. A daily close above the 200-day SMA at $8.8342 would put LINK through resistance it has not held in months, right as onchain data shows the heaviest whale participation since March.
A rejection at that level, with oscillators already stretched, would suggest the whale buying is being absorbed rather than breaking new ground. That 0.8% gap, not Standard Chartered’s 2030 target, is the level worth watching first.
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