Key Notes

• The top LINK whales have accumulated over $263 million worth of the asset.

• Bybit users withdrew over 101,000 LINK while Binance saw inflows.

• TMF analyst says “No catalyst is good enough in this market”. .

Chainlink has been seeing strong technical and fundamental signals over the past month, but the market-wide bearish sentiment continues to drag the asset down.

Firstly, according to data from Santiment, the top 100 Chainlink whales have accumulated 20.46 million LINK, worth $263 million, since early November.

? ChainLink's top 100 largest wallets have been accumulating since the start of November, collectively adding 20.46M $LINK (~$263M) back to their wallets.

? Watch the accumulation, & view the individual wallets that make up this group of whales here. ?https://t.co/YGqTlVizTm pic.twitter.com/P8A7j1vYTj

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) December 16, 2025

The movement has significantly lowered the LINK selling pressure since many investors expected the approval of the LINK-based exchange-traded funds in the US. 

Then, on Dec. 2, the Grayscale Chainlink Trust ETF began trading on the NYSE Arca exchange. While there aren’t many pure Chainlink ETFs yet, the landscape is emerging rapidly, with applications from others like Bitwise and CoinShares.

Related article: LINK Price Jumps 20% as First Chainlink ETF Goes Live

The ETF approval, along with the whales’ accumulation, triggered a short-lived rally for the LINK price, gaining 20% on Dec. 3.

What Will Drive the LINK Rally?

“No catalyst is good enough in this market,” wrote The Motley Fool analyst, hinting at LINK’s bearish momentum. 

The reopening of the US government, the US CPI data for September, the launch of the first LINK ETF, and the third consecutive US Fed’s rate cut brought short-term gains to the crypto market but the bullish sentiment soon faded.

While the analyst calls Chainlink a “solid long-term investment opportunity,” he adds that the current macroeconomic concerns have been pressuring the crypto market. For instance, the are fears of a recession in the US and Japan have been active as major bearish catalysts. 

LINK, the native token of the decentralized oracle network that connects blockchains with the real world, has recorded a 57% drop over the past 12 months.

The token dropped 6.5% in the past 24 hours and is trading at $12.7 at the time of writing. 

The overall Chainlink accumulation also seems solid. According to CoinGlass data, leading centralized crypto exchanges recorded a net outflow of 4.35 million LINK, worth $55.4 million, over the past 30 days.