Standard Chartered has initiated coverage on Chainlink and set a $200 price target for the end of 2030, implying roughly a 25-fold gain from the token’s current level near $8. The call comes from Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, who outlined a staged path for LINK at $13 by the end of this year, then $41, $82, $133, and finally $200 by the end of the decade. In the same note, Kendrick kept his long-term forecasts for Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ethereum at $40,000 by end-2030. The bank’s thesis rests on projected growth in tokenized assets and DeFi. Kendrick expects on-chain tokenized assets to rise from about $340 billion now to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, while assets deployed in DeFi are forecast to expand 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Standard Chartered argues that because Chainlink charges for data delivery and cross-chain asset movement, protocol fees could increase about 25 times over that period. The note also points to Chainlink’s existing market position, institutional customer base, and recent CCIP traction, while listing slower tokenization adoption, failed pilot conversions, market-share pressure, and technical failures among the main risks.

According to ChainCatcher, Onchain Lens monitoring shows a whale accumulated 387,830 LINK from Binance over the past 30 days, worth about $3.22 million. The whale moved the entire position to its Gnosis Safe wallet 13 hours ago.

On-chain analyst Ai Yi said a wallet withdrew 2,000 ETH from Binance about four hours before the report, with the withdrawn amount valued at $3.81 million at the time of the transfer. The funds did not stay at the original address. Instead, they were moved through two intermediary transfers before arriving at another wallet. The receiving address now holds ETH valued at $7.96 million, along with LINK valued at $1.03 million. The update, cited by Odaily, focuses on the movement of funds between addresses and the current asset value visible at the receiving wallet. No additional identity details for the addresses were disclosed in the report.

Chainlink has repurchased 139,956.08 LINK, a position worth approximately $1.13 million, according to on-chain monitoring service Onchain Lens. The tokens were then transferred into Chainlink's reserve wallet. Onchain Lens said the LINK was built up through multiple swaps on CoWSwap, and after being accumulated, the batch was sent to the reserve wallet. Current on-chain data shows the Chainlink reserve holds 5.35 million LINK, valued at an estimated $43.9 million. The average acquisition cost for the reserve's LINK position is $11.19 per token. The repurchase and transfer were identified through Onchain Lens monitoring. The source did not provide additional details about why the buyback was made or the exact time period over which the swaps took place. The figures reflect the state of Chainlink's reserve wallet as reported in the monitoring update. This is the latest movement involving a major Chainlink position and was categorized by ChainCatcher as whale movement.

A busy news cycle from Aug. 6 to Aug. 7 brought a mix of crypto regulation, market structure, corporate disclosures, and AI-linked developments. Dow Protocol said claims that OKX Ventures had invested in the project were false and said a list of investors would be released this week without OKX Ventures on it. The U.S. Senate, meanwhile, decided to delay a vote on the Clarity Act until September, extending uncertainty around a major federal crypto bill. Outside Washington, Thailand confirmed a five-year capital gains tax exemption on crypto trades executed through Thai SEC-licensed venues from Jan. 1, 2025 through Dec. 31, 2029. MetaMask introduced a self-custodial AI wallet that lets agents execute on-chain transactions within user-defined limits, and Wintermute registered a broker-dealer subsidiary with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. The update set also included Binance Alpha’s AGT and AIA blind box airdrop, Cipher Digital’s sale of 1,619 BTC at a realized loss, a Chainalysis report on more than $30 million in violent robbery losses targeting crypto holders in the first half of 2026, Bernstein’s renewed $140 target on Circle, and several funding, hardware, and security stories tied to the broader AI sector.

On-chain analyst Yu Jin (Ember) reported that an address suspected to be linked to Amber Group, 0x2a79...51b, withdrew approximately $9.97 million worth of digital assets from Binance roughly five hours ago. That total was built from five separate token positions, according to the monitoring data referenced in the analyst's report. The largest single position was 38.89 million ENA tokens, carrying a value of about $3.58 million. AAVE made up the second-largest share, with 28,262 tokens valued at approximately $2.52 million. The same withdrawal also included 1,140 ETH, estimated at $2.18 million. Two more positions completed the transfer: 2,017 BNB worth around $1.2 million, and 59,202 LINK tokens valued at roughly $490,000. Adding those figures together produces the approximately $9.97 million total cited by the analyst. The monitoring update flagged the address because of its suspected connection to Amber Group, though no destination address was specified alongside the withdrawal details.

NVIDIA has open-sourced Alpamayo 2 Super, a new inference model for autonomous driving and embodied AI, as the company sharpens its push into physical AI and robotics. The model has 34 billion parameters in total, combining a 32 billion-parameter NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Super Reasoner visual-language reasoning core with a 2 billion-parameter Diffusion Action Expert. According to the company, Alpamayo 2 Super adds Chain-of-Causation reasoning, allowing it to simulate edge cases in a virtual physical world within milliseconds and derive optimal decisions. It scored 79.2 on the LingoQA autonomous driving benchmark. CEO Jensen Huang said physical AI and robotics represent the next major wave of artificial intelligence, adding that self-driving vehicles are essentially robots with four wheels. The report also mapped out Taiwan’s role in NVIDIA’s ecosystem expansion, naming TSMC for foundry work on chips including Thor and Jetson, Foxconn and Quanta for system integration and mass assembly, and several industrial PC makers for edge control hardware. Other companies cited include Solomon in 3D AI vision sensing, HIWIN and related firms in precision motion components, Mirle in pneumatic control, and Delta Electronics in lightweight power modules. The article added that the 2026 Taiwan Automation Intelligence and Robot Show, scheduled for Aug. 19, could add to market attention on the sector.

Reports carried by Chinese media citing overseas outlets said the US Federal Communications Commission is drafting a rule that could ban imports of new Chinese optical transceiver modules, with officials reportedly aiming to publish and enforce the measure in 2026, while still leaving room for revisions or a delay. The report immediately rippled through equity markets: US optical-module names strengthened at one point, while major A-share suppliers opened lower before trimming losses, with Tianfu Communication ending higher. Industry data cited in the report points to a deeper issue for any forced separation. LightCounting said Chinese vendors now account for more than 60% of the global optical module market and hold an even larger share in 800G and 1.6T segments. Demand from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia alone is described as running into tens of millions of high-speed modules, while US domestic output remains far below that level. Revenue disclosures from Chinese manufacturers also show a heavy concentration of overseas, especially US, customers, highlighting the mutual dependence built into the current supply chain.