Chainlink Staking Begins with Initial Inflow of $51 Million

Early Access made its formal announcement with regards to the successful launch of its Chainlink Staking on the Ethereum mainnet. 

Chainlink (LINK) is a provider of price feeds and other data for blockchains to use in smart contracts. The platform introduced staking of its native token LINK on Tuesday. Selected holders locked in 7 million LINK tokens, worth about $51 million, in the first 30 minutes, according to a company spokesperson.

The staking pool, currently in beta, is initially capped at 25 million LINK, which the company says is a security-conscious approach, meaning 28% of the staking capacity was met within the first 30 minutes. The protocol is paying out 4.75% in annualized rewards to stakers in the form of LINK tokens.

The company didn’t respond to a request for a more recent figure sent outside of U.S. business hours. Chainlink said it plans to scale up to 75 million LINK over time. Some 500 million tokens are currently in circulation.

The program, which opens for general access on Dec. 8, lets people earn rewards in order to maintain the protocol’s performance and keep it more secure.

“What staking does is it allows us to scale the system by creating incentives that allow the system to grow,” Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said in an interview with CoinDesk.

The LINK rewards and Staked LINK will be locked until the next version of the protocol (STAKING v0.2) is released within nine to 12 months, the company said in a blog post.

At press time, Chainlink (LINK) was trading at about $6.85.

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