- Chainlink’s new-wallet surge has largely faded, with only about a quarter of the August spike still active.
- Active addresses held up far better than new ones, and the move was specific to LINK rather than market-wide.
- Price is holding the $11.16 Fibonacci level, the floor of its support zone, just under the $11.74 neckline.
- The wallet growth lines up with Chainlink’s Coinbase, Schwab and Bottomline integration news, not organic demand.
Chainlink drew a burst of fresh wallets to its network in late August, and most of them have already left. On-chain data from Santiment shows new daily addresses climbing from 974 in early August to a peak of 1,601, then settling back to 1,140. LINK price now sits at $11.64 after a spike to roughly $13.73 that followed a September 3 banking partnership, and the token is testing a level with unusual technical weight. The $11.16 to $11.74 band stacks the 0.382 Fibonacci retracement, the floor of a marked support zone, and the neckline of a possible double top on top of each other, which turns this week into a decision point for the chart.
Three quarters of the new wallets were gone within weeks
The retention split is the revealing part. New addresses, the count of wallets touching Chainlink for the first time, gave back roughly three quarters of their gain once the peak passed. Active addresses behaved differently. That metric rose from 3,599 to 5,572 and eased to 4,821, holding close to two thirds of the increase. First-time interest arrived and mostly moved on, while a solid share of wallets that were already transacting stayed put.
Santiment attached a caveat worth repeating, because it draws the line between data and interpretation. A rising active-address count cannot confirm that the same people kept returning. It could equally reflect a smaller group of wallets transacting more often. Address totals record activity, not the intent behind it, so the retained engagement is real while its exact source is not something the raw figures can settle. What the numbers do rule out is a broad crypto tailwind, since Solana and Ethereum barely moved over the same period. The wallet story belonged to LINK.
Coinbase, Schwab and Bottomline each brought a different crowd
The timing maps onto Chainlink’s deal flow, not a shift in retail mood. Late August brought word that Coinbase had picked Chainlink as the oracle layer for tokenized US stocks on Base, followed by Charles Schwab adding LINK alongside Solana and Avalanche to its brokerage. Each headline gave a distinct set of users a reason to touch the network for the first time, which is the exact profile of a new-address spike that fades once the news is priced.
The September leg came from Bottomline. On September 3, the payments provider, which serves more than 600 banks and processes roughly $16 trillion in annual volume, said it would connect institutions through Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol and Runtime Environment using ISO 20022 messaging. The news pushed LINK to around $13.73 within days. No pilot bank and no production date were confirmed, so the market read it as positioning rather than live revenue and sold the spike. That is the mechanism behind the double top now on the daily chart. Two catalysts, two pushes, the second one weaker.
The day before, Wyoming picked Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve to publish automated audit data for FRNT, making it the first U.S. state stablecoin to adopt the standard. Two announcements inside a week, one from a wholesale-payments provider and one from a state treasury, is the kind of cadence that pulls first-time wallets toward the network and explains the late-August address spike better than any retail narrative does.
Price is boxed between the $11.16 fib and the $11.74 neckline
A Fibonacci retracement takes the full run from the June low at $7.01 to the September high at $13.73 and marks the levels where a pullback tends to pause. The 0.382 retracement lands at $11.16 and forms the floor of the support zone drawn on the chart, and price is holding just above it. Directly overhead, the 0.236 level at $12.15 is the first resistance a recovery has to clear. The 20-day moving average at $11.74 sits inside this same band and doubles as the double-top neckline, the low between the two failed peaks. A decisive daily close beneath that line would confirm the pattern, a setup that echoes the make-or-break resistance test LINK faced last month, while holding it keeps the bullish structure alive.
A close above $12.15 would take the double top off the table
The two scenarios split cleanly at the fib levels. On the upside, reclaiming $12.15 and closing back above $12.50 to $13.00 would neutralize the reversal read and reopen the September highs, which is why the same consolidation can be labelled a bull flag rather than a top. On the downside, losing the $11.16 floor points first at $10.37, then the golden pocket at $9.58. That lower cluster carries extra weight because it overlaps two other markers: the textbook double-top projection near $9.9 to $10.0, calculated by subtracting the pattern’s height from the neckline, and the 50-day average at $9.99.
Momentum has already turned, which fits the cautious read. The Relative Strength Index, a 0-to-100 gauge of buying versus selling pressure, has rolled from the low 70s to 54.21 and dropped below its signal line at 64.15. A reading falling through its signal marks the point where upward momentum stalls. The RSI also failed to print a higher peak alongside the second price high, a mild divergence that often shadows this pattern. The broader trend argues the other way. The 20-day average sits above the 50-day and both above the 200-day, all rising after a golden cross, with price well clear of the 200-day at $9.09. This is a strong uptrend meeting its first real test, not one that has broken.
Open interest gave back more than $100 million from its high
Positioning in the futures market backs the profit-taking story. Open interest, the total value of outstanding derivatives contracts, reached about $784 million around the September 7 spike, an 11-month high, before easing to $666.81 million. Daily volume tracked at roughly $660.62 million. Falling open interest into a price pullback usually signals that traders are closing positions rather than stacking fresh shorts, which reads as an unwind rather than an aggressive bearish push.
Circle’s Arc launch on September 16 is the next real test
The near-term catalysts are already on the calendar, which is what separates this setup from a purely technical standoff. Circle’s Arc mainnet goes live on September 16 with Chainlink named as its oracle and connectivity partner, and the CCIP v1.5 upgrade, which adds self-serve token integrations and zkRollup support, is pending audit completion. Both would move Chainlink’s institutional narrative from announced deals toward measurable usage, the gap the Bottomline reaction exposed. Whether that produces wallets that stay, rather than wallets that spike and leave, is the question the next address print will answer.