Key Points
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Chainlink puts real-world economic data on the blockchain for a fee.
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Dogecoin might put a smile on your face if someone makes a silly meme with it.
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Counterintuitively, one of these assets has a reputation for skyrocketing prices, and the other doesn’t.
Some stories sell themselves, like the common one in crypto where you buy a coin, wait, see it go to the moon, and then happily retire. The problem is that stories don’t pay you, and when they’re totally unmoored from financial fundamentals, they’re more likely to impoverish you than to make you rich. So if you want a shot at making seven figures from a crypto investment, you need an asset that’s tied to a steady output of valuable work that someone will keep paying for, and at larger and larger scale.
And that’s the big chasm that separates the king of the meme coins, Dogecoin, (CRYPTO: DOGE) and Chainlink, (CRYPTO: LINK) an oracle coin. One is attention-powered, whereas the other is invoice-powered. Let’s assess which one is more likely to make investors into millionaires, and whether it’s a realistic goal for either of them.
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Image source: Getty Images.
Utility isn’t exciting, but people will pay for it
Blockchains cannot see the real world without data oracles, which are services that import outside information into the world of cryptocurrency.
Chainlink’s data feeds bring asset prices, economic information, commodity prices, and other crucial signals on-chain, and its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) lets assets and messages move safely across chains. Today, it’s a critical piece of the crypto sector’s infrastructure because market participants trust it to fulfill the oracle role.
In short, users pay for oracle services with the token, and staking it backs service reliability with economic skin in the game. That clever design ties token demand to the service’s actual usage and its security, and it also ensures that if adoption proceeds, demand will rise over time, sending the token’s value higher as well.
As a result of its utility and general trustworthiness, adoption signals are moving in the right direction. A handful of important financial institutions are running pilot programs using Chainlink, and as of late August, the U.S. government uses it to publish economic data on the blockchain.
Traction shows up in the numbers too. Chainlink reports its Total Value Secured (TVS) at near $100 billion. TVS is a rough proxy for how much capital depends on its services to function.
But could Chainlink make you into a millionaire? Its market cap is currently about $16 billion and it trade for about $24. While it’s possible to imagine it rising 10-fold during the next decade, or perhaps even sooner, it would be quite hard to become rich on the basis of that growth alone, unless you were willing to invest a lot of capital upfront. Therefore the odds of it being a good wealth-building investment are fine, but the odds of a lottery ticket-like return are very low.
Why Dogecoin’s odds are even longer
Dogecoin’s charm is genuine. The dog is cute, and the memes based around it were funny — at least for a time. But there’s no way it will make most investors into millionaires, and it will probably vaporize more of their money than it earns.
Dogecoin does not have any utility. It doesn’t natively support the kind of programmable smart contracts that power decentralized finance (DeFi) apps. Nor does holding it entitle the investor to a yield, or anything else.
Furthermore, its supply is constantly growing. There are about 5 billion new coins added to the supply outstanding annually, with no maximum. The supply growth rate declines as the base grows, but there is no hard cap to create long-run scarcity, nor any mechanism for generating demand, aside from hype. And capital that gets allocated as a result of hype is nearly always very fickle.
Could it still deliver outsized returns?
In frothy bull markets, celebrity attention and favorable macroeconomic tailwinds can indeed unleash powerful flows. So might the new Dogecoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) that just launched, as well as the others that might get approved later this year.
But sustained millionaire-maker outcomes usually require a value-generating flywheel. Dogecoin will never offer recurring service revenue to token holders, nor anything similar.
In contrast, Chainlink’s connection to real-world demand is getting tighter as banks and asset managers move beyond pilots toward production for tokenized funds and cross-chain settlement. If that continues, and it almost certainly will, Chainlink has a clearer line of sight to value accrual, even if there will be volatility and delays along the way.
Thus, for long-term investors hunting for a non-zero chance at making seven figures, Chainlink is the better choice by far, though it’s still a long shot.
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Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Chainlink. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.