Bitcoin Starts the Week Flat, But Chainlink Is Flying—Here's Why

In brief

• Bottomline, a top-three SWIFT services provider that processes more than $16 trillion in payments annually, announced a deal with Chainlink to connect its 600-plus bank customers to blockchain settlement.
• LINK touched $13.64 on September 7, its highest price since January 18, and outpaced every other top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap over the past 24 hours while Bitcoin stayed capped below $80,000.
• Chainlink's CCIP will move tokenized value across blockchains and its CRE will orchestrate the payment workflow, letting banks keep sending standard messages instead of building new infrastructure.

Bitcoin is back under $80,000 today, down about 1%, after a stellar August rally brought investors gains of over 20% in the last 30 days.

But as trading action on the crypto majors cools, there’s at least one altcoin climbing up the charts: the native token of the decentralized oracle network Chainlink, up a whopping 6.8% in the last 24 hours. Can it keep crypto’s hot summer going a little longer?

Bitcoin got rejected from $82,000 twice over the past two weeks and opened this one pinned below $80,000, still under the 50-week moving average near $81,000 it lost back in May.

The coin is also in a compression zone after a major spike in late August. Analysts are debating between the possibility of a trend reversal that would keep pushing prices up, and a so-called Bart Simpson pattern that would tank prices back down close to $65,000 in a few days.