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Points of Focus
- LINK rallied 6.27% this week, closing near $8.70 from $8.18.
- The Chainlink Reserve bought 139,956 LINK for $1.13 million on August 7.
- OpenAssets and Itau launched a Brazil tokenization pilot on August 11.
LINK opened the week at $8.1822 and climbed to an intraweek high of $8.8837 before settling at $8.6951, a weekly gain of $0.5129, or 6.27%, per TradingView data.
During the week of August 6-13, Chainlink paired a sharp price recovery with a cluster of institutional developments, a research note from Standard Chartered, and a fresh tokenization pilot in Brazil. It continued buybacks through its own revenue-funded reserve.
The rally arrived alongside a five-month high in whale transaction activity, even as the token’s own buyback mechanism revealed a cost basis sitting well above where LINK currently trades.
LINK (LINK) price this week
The move lifted the price back above its 10-day and 20-day simple moving averages (SMA) and the Hull MA, all now sitting below the spot price as support.
The recovery has not cleared the full moving average stack. The 20-day, 30-day, 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day exponential moving averages (EMA) remain above the current price as resistance, meaning this week’s rally reversed short-term momentum without yet resolving the broader multi-month downtrend that has held LINK below its 2026 highs.
The Chainlink Reserve keeps buying, but its own cost basis lags price
On August 7, the Chainlink Reserve purchased roughly 139,956 LINK for approximately $1.13 million through CoW Swap, bringing total reserve holdings to about 5.35 million LINK, according to onchain monitoring corroborated across several trackers. The reserve’s reported average acquisition price sits at $11.19, roughly 29% above LINK’s current spot price near $8.70.
The reserve converts a share of offchain and onchain protocol revenue into LINK purchases on an ongoing basis, a mechanism Chainlink has cited as central to its long-term value-accrual case. This week’s addition continues that pattern, though the gap between the reserve’s cost basis and current price is a detail worth tracking against the fee-growth thesis Standard Chartered laid out days earlier.
Standard Chartered initiates coverage as whale activity hits a five-month high
Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick initiated coverage of LINK on August 10 with a $200 price target for 2030, built on a projected 25-fold rise in Chainlink’s fee revenue as tokenized assets scale toward $4 trillion by 2028.
Santiment recorded 246 transactions above $100,000 in a 24-hour window on August 12, 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
Brazil’s largest bank joins a Chainlink-powered tokenization pilot
OpenAssets and Itau Unibanco, Latin America’s largest financial institution, announced a collaboration on August 11 to build tokenization proofs of concept for Brazilian capital markets, part of a pilot led by ANBIMA, the Brazilian Financial and Capital Markets Association.
OpenAssets and @itau are advancing tokenization across Brazil’s capital markets through @ANBIMA_BR's tokenization program.
Combining OpenAssets’ infrastructure with Itaú’s market expertise, the initiative advances tokenized fixed-income instruments and investment funds toward…
— OpenAssets (@OpenAssetsInc) August 11, 2026
The pilot will test issuance, trading, and settlement of tokenized fixed-income instruments and investment funds on a private, permissioned distributed ledger network, using Chainlink’s oracle platform to support the underlying infrastructure.
The tests run on simulated data without real financial transactions, an early-stage proof of concept rather than a production deployment.
What comes next
This week paired a real price recovery with institutional developments that reinforce Chainlink’s tokenization thesis on paper, a bank price target, a new bank pilot, and record whale activity.
At the same time, the network’s own buyback mechanism quietly reveals that revenue-funded demand has not yet caught up with the market’s current pricing of LINK.
Whether the fee growth Standard Chartered is modeling shows up in the reserve’s future purchases, at a cost basis closer to today’s price rather than last cycle’s, is the detail worth watching into next week.
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