First published 26 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 for staking, CCIP, and LINK on chains other than Ethereum. Chainlink is a network of operators who fetch facts from outside a blockchain and deliver them in a form smart contracts can read. The facts are things like a token’s price on exchanges, a currency rate, or proof that something happened off the chain. LINK is the token those operators are paid in, and the token the project uses when it asks operators to post a bond. LINK is not the price. A contract that trusts a feed is trusting the operators, the aggregation, and the feed’s heartbeat. It is not trusting the letters L-I-N-K in a wallet.
That distinction is the whole guide. The rest is origin, supply, and the ways a send goes to the wrong contract.
Where it came from
Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis, through a company then called SmartContract, published the Chainlink white paper in September 2017 and sold the token the same month. The supply was created at one billion LINK. It is not mined. The sale divided it into three piles that are still the right mental model: about 350 million to public buyers, about 350 million set aside to pay node operators over time, and about 300 million to the company. A pile set aside for operators is not coins already in your wallet, and a company allocation is not a protocol law. Unlocks and transfers from those piles are treasury events. They are not a halving.
The original token is an ERC-20 on Ethereum. Chainlink has since arranged for LINK to move on other networks. The Ethereum contract and a wrapped or native LINK on another chain are different entries. A bridge between them is extra software. A bridge is extra software, not a tunnel.
What an oracle is doing
A blockchain is a closed notebook. It can check a signature. It cannot look up the dollar price of ether on three exchanges unless someone writes that number in. An oracle is the someone. Chainlink’s usual pattern is a decentralised oracle network: several independent operators fetch the same data, the protocol aggregates the answers, and a contract on the destination chain can read the result. Off-chain reporting means much of that comparison happens off the ledger, and a summary lands on it, so you are not paying a fee for every operator’s raw note.
Aggregation is how one bad operator fails to set the price alone. It is not a warranty. Operators can share a bad source. A feed can go stale if nobody is paid to update it. A contract can read the wrong feed, or a feed for a thin market that was easy to push around. DeFi is software with rules you cannot call support about. When a lending app liquidates you, the feed it used is part of the machinery. LINK’s price moving is not that machinery. The feed’s answer is.
We will not describe how to lean on a thin feed. The reader’s question is what they hold, not how to break someone else’s contract.
LINK is a payment and a bond, not a chain
Node operators are paid in LINK for answers. Chainlink also runs a staking program in which LINK is locked against the operators’ work, with caps, unbonding, and rewards the program sets. Those terms have changed between versions. They will change again. Staking is a lock and a queue, not a savings account. A screenshot of a reward rate is a term sheet from the day it was taken, not a property of the token.
There is no Chainlink blockchain on which LINK is the native gas in the way ETH is gas on Ethereum. You pay Ethereum gas, or some other chain’s fee, to move LINK. If a tutorial tells you to buy LINK “to pay for the chain,” it has mixed up the token with the networks it sits on.
CCIP, the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, is Chainlink’s system for sending messages and tokens between chains. A message can tell another chain that something happened. It can also move a token into a wrapped form. Both are products with operators and contracts. Neither turns two ledgers into one.
Before you send it
Confirm the network. Ethereum LINK and a LINK on another chain do not arrive in each other’s wallets. Confirm the contract if you are not sending the well-known asset a recipient named, because copycats reuse the ticker. A wallet icon is a directory entry. Ignore tokens that appear uninvited. They are often bait that wants an approval. A wallet signature is not a handshake.
If you only wanted a price, you did not need to hold the token that pays the price’s couriers. If you hold LINK, you hold that payment token, with a company allocation and an operator pool in its past, on whatever network your wallet is actually using. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, stake, or bridge it.
