With Sibos coming up, a lot of LINK investors are anticipating at the very least a working prototype of ChainLink's smart oracles being used for SWIFT message processing using APIs.
Long story short:
Sibos is an annual financial services event hosted by Swift.
SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) connects over 11,000 financial institutions worldwide. Through the swift network, financial institutions can send messages (over 5 billion a year!) to instruct activities relating to payments, securities, FX etc.
ChainLink was one of the winners of the 2016 Innotribe Competition (held by SWIFT)
Over 8300 people attended last years' conference.
A new company called Confido announced that they are using Chainlink in their project.
From their website:
“Confido is a payment solution developed to be used by both businesses and individuals. It provides secure escrow payments using smart contracts, without relying on a third party to control the money. The unique thing about Confido is its shipment tracking feature. Confido will track a package up to the point that it gets delivered, and will only then release the funds. This is all done in a trustless and decentralised fashion using smart contracts on the Ethereum & RSK blockchain combined with Chainlink.”
Basically, a Craigslist that makes paying with crypto safer.
Finally, there's the price (and circulation) of the LINK token.
Currently, it's only listed on Binance. Applications are out of Poloniex and possibly Bittrex in the near future. ChainLink currently has a market cap of $145 million (ranked 47), and has been trading in the 40-43 cents range the last few days.
I'm betting that even after the conference, LINK will stay in the 35-45 cents range. At least through the end of the year. The token was only launched in mid September (7 months ago in crypto-years ;) ) I've seen Summer being thought of as mid-term, and at least 2019 before we get into Long Term.
For one, it is expected that ChainLink will present a working prototype at the conference. The price already reflects them meeting the expectation. It's also hard to deny that Bitcoin is in hot new territory, and Alts are, for the most part, treading water. Fork or not, Bitcoin has the potential to run away with an even bigger slice of the pie the rest of the year.
At the very least, I think LINK has an interesting project on their hands. They're only traded on one exchange at the moment, their token is a month old, and they have a lot going for them networking-wise.
The subreddit is still small, although there might be too much talk of lambos for your taste. Most of all though I think the community behind ChainLink is excited to invest in something that has a really great solution to a real world problem.