How Partnerships Paved the Way for Chainlink's 625% YTD Return

With every new product, there is an ideal go-to-market strategy. This strategy depends on the founders’ strengths, the target market, the current economic climate, and the nature of the product itself.

Decentralized technologies are no different, and the characteristics that define each go-to-market strategy tend to be sector-specific. Smart contract platforms require a robust and passionate developer community to construct complementary applications on top of these networks. For DeFi projects with token-weighted governance, it often involves getting tokens into the right contributor’s hands rather than just any jabroni.

Chainlink is currently writing the playbook for the oracle sector. Its strategy: build a massive pipeline of future integrations (and market them hard).

This approach has already paid off immensely. Chainlink has announced 112 new partnerships in 2020, with LINK up 628% over that same period. It’s also hard to ignore how LINK price movements have reflected the frequency of monthly announcements, even if it’s merely coincidental.

Chainlink has a massive pipeline of over 100 projects that have signed on to plug into its oracle feeds. Eleven others have already integrated or intend to integrate Chainlink’s VRF (Verifiable Random Function) to serve as a reliable function for applications that rely on unpredictable outcomes, such as betting. In total, Chainlink has amassed almost 200 such partnerships since its mainnet launch.