>>10979411
Also, there is the other 300M in the hands of Sergey. If we assume that this is where the high-value clients (SWIFT, Salesforce, Accord) will get their LINK, they'd have reason to pump the price. While this sounds deluded, imagining them going on Binance to pump fucking LINK for some reason, you need to keep in mind that while LINK is used as payment when using the network, the fee per request is still measured in fiat. If they are sold 100M LINK each valued at $1 per token, it means they'd have $100M LINK worth to be used as payments for the network. If per request, it costs $1 each, they can use the network 100M times before they need to buy LINK again. I think their accounting departments can easily work out that using $1M to pump 10x an illiquid market (at the beginning) to increase the value of their LINK stack by $900M would be profitable. Not to mention hoarding as much LINK as they can before other companies do the same thing I mentioned. This seems extremely deluded but if you put yourself in the shoes of SWIFT and the like, it just seems simple game theory at that point.
Again, all of this assumes that the network is actually being used, that companies would actually benefit from utilising smart contracts. I avoided as much as possible including numbers because the point of this thread is to only talk about how LINK would increase in value, not how much. To summarize, 1. Speculation/hype from partnerships, 2. Demand from the users of the network, 3. Demand from would-be node operators. If you feel restless waiting for it to moon I think the most productive thing you can do >>FOR LINK<< (because there are definitely other shit you can do for yourself) besides making LINK content is studying how to run a node. Check out how to use AWS, or building your own VPS to run a node (Thomas says in Telegram that it's easily achievable).