Chainlink, the largest Oracle provider connecting blockchains to real-world data, rolled out the newest version of its staking program Tuesday afternoon and drew more than $140 million in deposits in the first six hours.
The “v0.2” mechanism increases the staking pool size to 45 million LINK, more than 8% of the token’s circulating supply, and aims to increase the accessibility of staking, according to the project’s blog post. With stakers migrating to the new version to secure the protocol and claim rewards, Chainlink has sunset its “v0.1” program.
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The newest iteration comes one year after the blockchain data provider first introduced staking of its native LINK token. Since then, institutional adoption of Chainlink services as well as other technical upgrades aimed at increasing user efficiency and reducing costs has grown.
In October, Chainlink introduced “Data Streams,” which aims to decrease the time for data to travel to its end destination. At the end of August, Swift – an interbank messaging system that facilitates cross-border payments – announced the success of its experiments with Chainlink in transferring tokenized assets across several private and public blockchains.
Read more: Chainlink Community Staking Pool Full, Drawing More Than $620M
According to Chainlink’s staking landing page, “the v0.2 staking reward rate for community stakers is variable and depends on the total amount of LINK staked in the pool. With a full community pool, the effective base floor reward rate for community stakers is currently 4.32%.”
At presstime, users had deposited more than 9.5 million LINK tokens into the community staking pool, making the current v0.2 variable reward rate stand at almost 18.4%. LINK has increased 2.4% over the past 24 hours and 101.5% in the past year to trade at $14.53, according to CoinGecko data.
