Why $LINK Is Mostly Just A Memecoin
I love $LINK . I trade it. I hold it. I respect what Chainlink has built. It’s always lived in my bucket of “blue-chip crypto” assets I’m comfortable rotating into when the timing is right. That said, it's possible to love something and still tell the truth about it (remember my HL post?). And the truth is that LINK, like most crypto tokens, functions far more as what I've come to call a "protocol meme" than a utility asset for the 99.9% of holders.
There is no revenue shares flowing back to holders. No dividends. No stock certificate in the company. No protocol earnings being redistributed downstream. Holding LINK does not entitle you to a slice of oracle fees in any direct, mechanical way. That alone should frame expectations properly. The value proposition is not “owning a piece of Chainlink’s revenue.” It is “owning exposure to a belief that this token will be more valuable later than it is today.
Most crypto tokens, even the ones powering legitimate infrastructure, derive the bulk of their market value from collective belief. Belief that adoption will increase. Belief that demand will outpace supply. Belief that future utility might justify present valuation. That is not fundamentally different from how fiat currencies work, by the way. Dollars are not backed by gold. They are backed by shared trust, enforcement, and a strong narrative. Crypto just strips away some of the polite illusions.
Understanding this is freeing. It lets you trade LINK (and other tokens) rationally instead of religiously. You stop pretending you’re buying shares of company stock and start acknowledging you’re trading narrative narrative and mindshare. You buy when belief is cheap. You sell when belief is expensive. You don’t confuse admiration of a protocol with magical thinking about a token.
LINK doesn’t need to be more than that to be tradable, profitable, or relevant. What are some of your favorite "protocol memes" that offer no real use case to the majority of traders?