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

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.

In terms of fundamentals, traders are watching two catalysts this month: fresh inflation data and the Federal Reserve’s September 16 rate decision, after Friday’s stronger-than-expected August jobs report raised the odds of a hike.

Chainlink, meanwhile, had a different week entirely.

Chainlink, which trades as LINK, climbed to $13.64 Monday, its highest level since January 18. That’s a roughly 6.8% gain in 24 hours, the best showing among the 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap—while most of the group traded flat to lower. In the derivatives market, open interest on LINK contracts also hit an 11-month high of $784 million.

The rally may trace back to a deal Chainlink announced last week with Bottomline, a top-three SWIFT services provider that handles payments automation and treasury management for more than 600 banks.

Per Chainlink’s announcement, Bottomline will connect its existing systems to public and private blockchains through Chainlink’s infrastructure. Bottomline also serves roughly 1,200 financial institutions and 10,000 businesses worldwide.

Two existing Chainlink products do the work. Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, or CCIP, has been live since July 2023 and now spans more than 60 blockchains, handling the movement of tokenized value between them. Chainlink Runtime Environment, or CRE, coordinates what the company calls “payment workflows end-to-end,” handling routing and confirmations along the way.

Banks keep sending the same ISO 20022 messages they already use, the global standard for cross-border payment instructions that reached 97% adoption since a November 2025 switchover. Chainlink sits underneath as the connector rather than a replacement. Neither company has disclosed a go-live date or named a pilot bank.

Not Chainlink’s first brush with SWIFT

SWIFT itself has tested Chainlink before. In 2023, SWIFT ran interoperability experiments with Chainlink and more than 10 institutions, including Citi and BNY Mellon, moving tokenized assets onto Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet.

Standard Chartered listed SWIFT among the institutions already using Chainlink services last month when the bank set a $200 price target for LINK by 2030, citing Chainlink’s $110 billion in secured value.

What’s more, in late August, the financial services giant Charles Schwab announced plans to expand its retail crypto trading offering beyond just Bitcoin and Ethereum. The brokerage only chose three more assets to list on its trading platform: Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink.

The combination of bullish news may be a big part of the reason why Chainlink is currently outperforming just about every other coin in the top 20 by market cap, other than Zcash: LINK is currently up 57% in the last 30 days.