Bitcoin starts week flat as Chainlink climbs 6.8%

Chainlink's LINK token climbed 6.8% in 24 hours to $13.64. Bitcoin started the week flat. Bitcoin traded below $80,000 after falling about 1%. LINK recorded the strongest performance among the 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Most of those cryptocurrencies traded flat to lower. Open interest on LINK contracts reached an 11-month high of $784 million. Bitcoin had been rejected at $82,000 twice over the past two weeks. Bitcoin remained below its 50-week moving average near $81,000. Analysts are debating whether Bitcoin will reverse its trend or form a Bart Simpson pattern that could take it close to $65,000 in a few days. Traders are watching fresh inflation data and the Federal Reserve's September 16 rate decision. A stronger-than-expected August jobs report raised the odds of a rate hike. The rally may trace back to a deal Chainlink announced last week with Bottomline. Bottomline handles payment automation and treasury management for more than 600 banks. Bottomline serves roughly 1,200 financial institutions. Bottomline serves 10,000 businesses worldwide. Bottomline will connect its existing systems to public and private blockchains through Chainlink's infrastructure. Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol has been live since July 2023. CCIP now spans more than 60 blockchains and moves tokenized value between them. Chainlink's Runtime Environment coordinates payment workflows end-to-end. Banks can continue sending the same ISO 20022 messages they already use. ISO 20022 reached 97% adoption after a November 2025 switchover. Neither company has disclosed a go-live date. Neither company has named a pilot bank. SWIFT ran interoperability experiments with Chainlink and more than 10 institutions in 2023. The experiments moved tokenized assets onto Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. Standard Chartered listed SWIFT among institutions already using Chainlink services last month. Standard Chartered set a $200 price target for LINK by 2030. Standard Chartered cited Chainlink's $110 billion in secured value. Charles Schwab announced plans in late August to expand its retail crypto trading offering beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. Schwab selected Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink as three additional assets for its trading platform. LINK was up 57% over the last 30 days.