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1. The market cap of $LINK will eventually be mind-bendingly high, and some of the price predictions thrown around by myself and others have drawn predictable objections due to the fact that those prices would result in an astronomical market cap.
2. But there are already are a number of common things that everyone engages with on a daily basis that would have an astronomical “market cap” if those things could be broken down into a finite number of discrete parts that could accurately measure their true value to the world.
3. The easiest example is, of course, the Internet, but roads and telephones also come to mind. The total value of any of things is impossible to calculate, but if we were somehow able to quantify them, their “market caps” would be stunningly high.
4. To accurately measure the total value of telephones, for example, we’d have to do more than simply multiply the number of phones sold in a given stretch of time by the average cost of each phone.
5. We’d somehow have to assess the proportional value of all business done using those phones, the convenience we gain by communicating with them, etc. This is impossible to do, and therefore we are never able to really represent the true value of telephones as a dollar figure.
6. Some may scoff and say that such things aren’t meant to have a clearly definable total value, and I only agree insofar that we’re completely unable to settle on what kind of equation would adequately serve to calculate them.
7. Chainlink is an economy, a paradigm shift, a major leap forward that can and will be worthy of mentioning in the same breath as the Internet, roads, and telephones... but with one major difference.
8. Unlike the Internet, roads, and telephones, Chainlink is built in a way that will make its total value to the world far easier to assess, and it will be done in a way that most will be able to agree upon.
9. We’ll use market cap, and we’ll use it in a way that presently doesn’t apply to any other asset I’m aware of.
10. With regard to stocks or other assets, market cap is a simple measure that multiplies the number of outstanding shares (or tokens, etc.) of that stock by the current market price. That’s it. It’s purely a measure of current speculative value.
11. While the market cap of a stock can often have some seeming resemblance to the performance of the company issuing that stock, this is not always the case; Uber’s stock, for example, has little to no direct relation to the company’s income statement or balance sheet...
12. ... and it definitely has no correspondence to the price you or I pay to ride in one of their driver’s vehicles.
13. Chainlink is certainly driven primarily by speculation today, but speculation will have a smaller and smaller effect on the market cap of Chainlink as the years pass by.
14. The Chainlink economy will arrive, over time, and in the most capitalistic of ways, at a market-wide agreement on what the total value of this innovation is.
15. Staking of the $LINK token as collateral combined with fierce competition for the token to participate in the $LINK economy will drive the token price up — and there will never be more than one billion Chainlink tokens.
16. The market cap will, at once, serve to quantify the total savings companies realize by using Chainlink and not legacy methods, as well as the parabolic value of smart contracts as a vehicle for the creation of new wealth-generating opportunities.
17. One will purchase $LINK tokens themselves to participate in this economy, or pay in fiat which will be converted to $LINK behind the scenes, but at the end of the day the $LINK token itself will be the monetary unit that drives the entire system.
18. If you could only buy an iPhone by paying with Apple stock, then we would have a similarity here, but the purchase of an iPhone and investment in Apple stock are two completely different things. With $LINK, they’ll be the same thing.
19. Chainlink is not a company, it’s a data economy, and thousands of little firms (nodes) will exclusively use the $LINK token as a measure of their own business risk as well as exclusively accepting the token as the final means of exchange.
20. So what is the total value of this innovation in technology, business, law, etc? I don’t know, I can only surmise. But in the long run I believe it will be in the many trillions, and dividing by one billion will give you the possible future value of one $LINK token.
21. Yes, the value is speculative today. I don’t believe $LINK can reach these heady projections on speculation alone, but only because of the adoption of smart contracts, or, more appropriately, “automation engines.”
22. So when myself and others foresee $1000 or even $10,000 as a possible future $LINK price, we’re not mindlessly bullish for purely speculative reasons. We believe this because we believe Chainlink is the next major milestone in the development of business technology.
23. Never before will it have been so easy to quantify the total monetary value of a paradigm shift, but we’ll do it using the market cap of the $LINK token, and I believe it’s going to be a very high number. LINK Marines understand.
