Chainlink tokens surged Thursday as wealthy investors swapped ether for link (LINK) following the release of the company's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) earlier this week, data shows.

LINK exchanged hands for $8 around midday in Europe as trading volume more than doubled to $580 million, helping extend weekly gains to over 25%.

On-chain data shows some whales – or large holders of an asset – added upward of $6 million to their link holdings during the morning, with the increased demand lifting prices as much as 6%.

2 whales (probably the same person) bought a total of 788,877 $LINK ($6 million) for $7.62 just now.

The whale swapped all 3,074 $stETH ($5.87M) and 71 $ETH ($136K) for 788,877 $LINK.

This purchase increased the price of $LINK by 6.5%. pic.twitter.com/ajLBP8Vesz
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) July 20, 2023

CCIP is designed to help build cross-chain applications and services. It was being tested by at least 25 partners that are now beginning to move to the mainnet, and was pushed live for early access users on the Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon blockchains.

On Thursday, CCIP will become available to all developers across five testnets: Arbitrum Goerli, Avalanche Fuji, Ethereum Sepolia, Optimism Goerli and Polygon Mumbai.

Prices of some other oracle protocols also rose, CoinGecko data shows. In the past 24 hours, Band Protocol’s BAND added 9% while Uma’s UMA and API3 both jumped 5.4%.

Oracles are blockchain-based services that fetch data from outside a blockchain. Blockchains, by design, are immutable stores of data, but can’t verify the veracity of information. This is where oracle networks like Chainlink help – they refer multiple sources of information to provide reliable data to blockchain-based services and products for users.

On-chain Data Chainlink Link Markets

Shaurya Malwa

Shaurya is the Co-Leader of the CoinDesk tokens and data team in Asia with a focus on crypto derivatives, DeFi, market microstructure, and protocol analysis. Shaurya holds over $1,000 in BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, SUSHI, CRV, NEAR, YFI, YFII, SHIB, DOGE, USDT, USDC, BNB, MANA, MLN, LINK, XMR, ALGO, VET, CAKE, AAVE, COMP, ROOK, TRX, SNX, RUNE, FTM, ZIL, KSM, ENJ, CKB, JOE, GHST, PERP, BTRFLY, OHM, BANANA, ROME, BURGER, SPIRIT, and ORCA. He provides over $1,000 to liquidity pools on Compound, Curve, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, BurgerSwap, Orca, AnySwap, SpiritSwap, Rook Protocol, Yearn Finance, Synthetix, Harvest, Redacted Cartel, OlympusDAO, Rome, Trader Joe, and SUN.