LINK, the native cryptocurrency of the decentralized blockchain oracle network, Chainlink, has seen a surge in whale activity, with over $1 billion reported in large transaction volume in the last 24 hours. This massive movement has caught the attention of the crypto community.

According to IntoTheBlock data, Chainlink's large transaction volume increased by 1700.73% in the past day, totaling $1.01 billion, or 73.41 million LINK in cryptocurrency terms. This is the largest large transaction volume recorded yearly, except for Sept. 20, 2024, when large transaction volumes reached 65.02 million LINK.

LINK has seen notable activity in the last 24 hours. Chainlink completed its quarterly token unlock the day before, releasing a total of 19 million LINK tokens (nearly $262 million) from two noncirculating supply addresses. Among them, 14.875 million LINK (about $205 million) were transferred directly to Binance, and the remaining 4.125 million LINK (nearly $57.04 million) were sent to a multisig address.

Before this, Chainlink had unlocked 10 times, with nine of them seeing price increases 30 days after unlocking.

Since August 2022, Chainlink has unlocked 176 million LINK (now worth around $2.43 billion). Among these tokens, 151.3 million LINK were directly deposited to Binance at an average price of $11.41. Chainlink still holds 342.5 million LINK worth nearly $4.7 billion across multiple noncirculating supply contracts.

Whales making moves

On-chain analytics platform SpotOnChain reported yesterday that a crypto whale spent 7.1 million USDC to buy 506,226 LINK at an average price of $14.03. To fund the transaction, the whale sold 1,108.83 ETH for 2.1 million USDC and withdrew another five million USDC from Spark. Following this, the whale's total LINK purchase in the time frame increased to 863,174 LINK, worth $12.1 million at an average price of $14.02, having made previous moves on Chainlink.

In an unexpected move, the whale sold 1.34 million LINK on-chain for $18.36 million at $13.7, a loss of $512,000 or 2.7%.

At the same time, the whale closed its LINK longs on GMX for a $195,000 profit and flipped its LINK longs on Hyperliquid into BTC shorts worth 40x leverage, but now it is sitting on an unrealized $290,000 profit. This move coincides with Chainlink’s big unlock hitting the market.