Chainlink (LINK) Rallies 24% While New Wallets Grow Under 2%, Santiment Data Shows

A 24% Rally With 2% New Addresses

The Chainlink (LINK) price has climbed about 24% since Sept. 1, yet the rally has added almost no new users to the network. On-chain data shows new wallet addresses on the Chainlink (LINK) network averaged 1,249 per day over the four weeks to Oct. 6, against 1,225 per day over the four weeks to Sept. 1. That is an increase of less than 2%, or about 24 extra addresses a day. The readings come from Santiment on X, the on-chain analytics desk that tracks address creation across major networks, and date to Oct. 6. The comparison with peers is stark. New Solana addresses grew 33% over a similar window while SOL gained about 20%; Ethereum saw little growth in new addresses despite an increase of roughly 11% in ETH. LINK sits between the two on price and closer to Ethereum on users, though its 24% gain outpaced both peers over the same window. A wallet address, the public identifier a user generates to receive tokens, is created each time someone opens a new account or moves funds to a fresh wallet, so the count is a rough proxy for first-time adoption. It is also a coarse one: traders can move existing balances without ever opening a new wallet, and much of September's volume likely came from holders already positioned. At the time of writing, Chainlink (LINK) changes hands near $13.41, marginally below where it stood when the data was published and down about 4% over the past 24 hours, after closing near $13.96 on Oct. 6. The gap between a 24% price gain and a sub-2% rise in daily address creation frames the debate around the token: how much of the move reflects durable demand, and how much is price running ahead of the network it is priced on.

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The levels around the current quote come from COINOTAG's composite scoring, which grades each support and resistance line from 0 to 100 on the indicators that converge there: support at $13.0570 scores 74 out of 100 and resistance at $14.7050 scores 89, both rated strong on our Chainlink technical analysis page. Momentum sits close to neutral, with the relative strength index at 51.42. Positioning is similarly mild: perpetual funding runs at 0.0056% and open interest stands near $274.5 million, a long-leaning book without visible leverage stress. A recovery through $14.7050 would put the $15.45 close of Sept. 28 back in reach, while losing $13.0570 would hand the two-month advance its first serious test.

CCIP 2.0 and the September Run

The price path behind the adoption gap had two distinct phases. Chainlink (LINK) closed Sept. 1 at about $11.23, spiked above $13 in the first days of September, then pulled back hard to an intraday low of $10.618 on Sept. 16. Buyers took control from there. The token broke $12 on Sept. 18, pushed above $15 in the days after, and on Sept. 28 delivered the biggest single-day move of the rally, up 10.15% to close near $15.45 after touching $15.77 intraday. On closing prices alone, that was about 38% above the Sept. 1 close. The token has since given back ground and trades well below that $15.45 mark, and even at its peak it remained far short of its all-time high. The rally unfolded alongside a burst of ecosystem releases across the Chainlink stack, the heaviest of them CCIP 2.0, launched on Sept. 28. The upgrade reworks the protocol's cross-chain infrastructure, the layer that routes messaging and cross-chain bridges between networks, and hands institutions and asset issuers more direct control: optional extra verifiers beyond the base set, a design Chainlink detailed separately as issuer-set verifiers, faster-than-finality transfers, configurable fees, and native compliance through the Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine. LINK rose 10% on Sept. 28, the day CCIP 2.0 went live, though a same-day coincidence does not establish that the upgrade drove the move. The address record argues for the same caution. Scenarios that project far higher prices for the token, from Microsoft Copilot's $100 SWIFT scenario to Google Gemini's $300 2027 target, rest on institutional and user growth the current data does not yet show. Set the two references side by side and the distance is the point: roughly 24% of price against under 2% of new users, with a closing peak from Sept. 28 the market has yet to revisit.