It doesn’t seem that institutions fully buy the hype surrounding the cycle 2025. “fundamentals-led” story.
Ethereum for instance, fell 11% by 2025 but still saw high on-chain activity.
In context, Fuska upgrades and Pecta improvements have reduced congestion and fees. Daily transactions reached even a record of 2,3 million. This shows that the upgrades started to deliver results during the cycle 2026.
But the big bucks aren’t showing.
On-chain strength, institutional hesitation
ETF Flows Reached Nearly $664 Million outflows Just this past week. In contrast, Chainlink’s [LINK] Grayscale ETF GLNK has received inflows of $4.05 million, a marked divergence.
Source: SoSoValue
Consider this in context Ethereum’s [ETH] Grayscale Spot ETF Over the same time period, (ETHE), saw outflows of $52 millions. Layer-1s should not consider this kind of divergence as a temporary rotation.
Continuing on from that. SoSoValue data The contrast was even more pronounced.
Chainlink ETF continues to grow faster than the market Dogecoin’s [DOGE], whose net inflows still trail LINK, even though DOGE’s market cap is nearly 3× larger.
This suggests that the ETFs investing in Chainlink are not chasing short term moves. It raises the following question: is LINK still experiencing a fundamentally-driven rally among high-cap assets?
Chainlink attempts to retain DeFi dominance amid intensified rivalry
DeFi is set to return mainstream in 2025.
DeFiLlama data as at press time. total value locked TVL across Layer-1s climbed to $170 Billion, the highest since 2022 when the market was in a bearish phase.
Stablecoins and RWA are key areas where this growth is evident.
Chainlink has joined the Global Alliance for KRW Stablecoins. This puts it in the middle of things. Korea’s stablecoin expansion.
Source: DeFiLlama
Chainlink has no intention of sitting out DeFi.
Integrating into stablecoins, the backbone of DeFi, strengthens LINK’s fundamentals, which include privacy, compliance and interoperability. This positions LINK as a major infrastructure player.
Meanwhile, network’s total value secured TVS hit a $70 billion record in Q4 of 2025. This reflects the assets that are powered by Chainlink oracles. It is a sign of trust and usage.
It’s not surprising that interest from institutions is increasing. Chainlink ETF flows are less speculative in this context and appear to be more driven by fundamentals, which makes LINK stand out amongst its competitors.
Conclusions
- Chainlink has continued to see inflows despite Ethereum’s ETFs for Dogecoin and Ethereum seeing large outflows. It is clear that the institutional market prefers LINK as an alternative high-cap asset.
- Chainlink, with its global integration of stablecoins, key infrastructure and TVS’s $70 billion milestone, is a major DeFi player.
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Source: ambcrypto.com
