For Santiment, there is no short-term speculation but real participation.
Chainlink “could be a candidate for a bullish breakout,” say analysts at this firm.
Chainlink (LINK), the native token of the leading decentralized oracle network, shows a divergence between price and network activity. While its price lost the $8 level, the number of wallets with at least one unit of the token reached its highest level since December 2022.
In the last week, between June 3 and 9, 2026, chainlink went from $8.82 to $7.92, representing a drop of more than 9%.
Despite this drop in the price of the asset, the data provided by Santiment, an on-chain analysis firm, show that the Chainlink network now contains 535,430 wallets with at least one unit of the token.
“What makes this particularly significant is that the growth has occurred while LINK price remains well below its cycle highs,” the analysts noted.
In the previous graph you can see the yellow line that represents the growth in the number of wallets with at least 1 LINK from June 2021 to June 2026. For Santiment analysts this performance is “important because it measures participation instead of speculation.”
In other words, while the price can rise or fall driven by short-term sentiment, A sustained increase in the number of wallets is often interpreted as a sign of persistent interest within an ecosystem.
However, this type of metrics has limitations. The data allows addresses to be counted, but not to identify who controls them. That is to say, A wallet can belong to an exchange, an institutional custodian, an investment fund or a private user.as explained by CriptoNoticias.
It is also important to clarify that a wallet is not necessarily equivalent to a person or entity. A single participant can control multiple addresses with LINK, so The growth of wallets does not automatically imply an equivalent increase in the number of users.
Even so, Santiment considers that the trend is positive for the network. “The growth of new participants in the ecosystem is encouraging, especially during periods of market uncertainty,” the firm noted.
The growth in the number of wallets holding LINK also coincides with a period of greater institutional activity for Chainlink. As reported by CriptoNoticias, during May progress was made known related to Kraken, Fidelity International and DTCC, one of the main post-trading infrastructures of the US stock market.
Among those developments, Kraken chose this network to improve the interoperability of kBTC, its tokenized version of bitcoin. Fidelity International, for its part, uses Chainlink infrastructure in FILQ, its tokenized fund.
For this reason, Santiment considers that the cryptocurrency, currently in 17th place by market capitalization (with a value of 5.7 billion dollars), “could be a candidate for a bullish breakout when the markets become favorable again.”