- Chainlink just unlocked 19 million LINK worth $269 million.
- 14.875M LINK landed on Binance, likely boosting liquidity.
- A well-known Hyperliquid trader placed a massive long bet on LINK.
- Despite the moves, LINK jumped 4% after recent price drops.
Chainlink just unlocked 19 million LINK tokens, valued at around $269 million, following its usual quarterly schedule. This kind of release isn’t new, but the large transfer to Binance has definitely caught attention.
Of the total unlocked tokens, a huge chunk—14.875 million LINK ($212.9 million)—was sent straight to Binance. This is nothing unusual, considering Binance handles a significant portion of LINK’s daily trading volume.
CHAINLINK UNLOCKS 19M $LINK ($269M) IN LATEST QUARTERLY RELEASE
— Cult of Blockchain (@BlockchainCult) March 14, 2025
🔹 14.875M $LINK ($212.9M) sent to #Binance
🔹 4.125M $LINK ($56.2M) moved to multi-sig wallet "0xD50"
Since August 2022, @Chainlink has unlocked 176M $LINK (worth $2B then, now $2.43B), with 151.3M $LINK deposited… pic.twitter.com/5fwFgX9F6k
The rest, 4.125 million LINK ($56.2 million), was moved to a multi-signature wallet (0xD50). Chainlink has been doing this for years, consistently following the same token release pattern.
According to SpotOnChain, Chainlink has unlocked 176 million LINK tokens since August 2022. At the time, those tokens were worth about $2 billion, but today, they’re sitting at $2.43 billion.
And it’s not like Chainlink is running out of tokens anytime soon—there’s still a massive stash of 342.5 million LINK ($4.7 billion) locked away in non-circulating supply contracts.
Hyperliquid Trader Makes a Bold Bet on LINK
While Chainlink was busy unlocking tokens, a well-known trader on Hyperliquid made a huge bet on LINK—and this isn’t just any trader.
Nicknamed the “ETH 50x Big Guy,” this trader is famous for using insane leverage. In fact, just days ago, he caused a $4 million loss for Hyperliquid after testing the platform’s risk system.
Now, he’s shifting focus to LINK. On March 14, he opened a $31,000 long position on LINK with 10x leverage across Hyperliquid and GMX. On top of that, he bought 863,174 LINK tokens for $12.1 million USDC.
But here’s the twist—shortly after making those moves, he started quietly cashing out by swapping small amounts of LINK into stablecoins.
Hyperliquid clearly took notice. After his risky trades shook up the platform, they quickly announced a new 20% margin ratio requirement on margin transfers, set to kick in on March 15 at 00:00 UTC.
This change won’t affect cross-margin trading unless leverage exceeds 5x after an isolated position is opened. Hyperliquid says this is meant to tighten risk management while still letting traders use up to 40x leverage.
Despite all the chaos, LINK’s price is holding strong. In fact, after weeks of losses, it bounced back 4% to $13.90—recovering from a 12% drop in the past week and a 27% slump over the past month.