It's quick and easy to buy ChainLink on a cryptocurrency exchange like [Cointree](/home). All you need to do is sign up and verify your identity, deposit some funds, and you can begin buying and selling digital currencies. Once you buy ChainLink on our exchange, you can store it in your free multi-coin wallet or transfer it to an external wallet. You can get started in minutes.

ChainLink has been a good investment for many holders, especially for those who invested when the project first launched in 2017. Many long term holders believe the protocol has a bright future as the demand for decentralised oracle solutions is expected to grow. With economies of scale improving along with ChainLink's network effects, it could provide the highest quality data at very low costs. Already the market leader with the most widely adopted decentralised oracle network across the entire crypto ecosystem, some traders consider ChainLink to be well placed to take advantage of this opportunity. Its decentralised services already include price feeds, proof of reserve, verifiable randomness, APIs and more. And some see LINK playing an important role as the currency in a two-sided marketplace. It's positioned to serve some of the fastest growing sectors in crypto, including DeFi, web3, and dynamic NFTs. As always, past performance does not guarantee future performance and contact a licensed professional if you would like any financial advice.

[Blockchain oracles](/learn/what-is-an-oracle/) are the bridge that connects blockchains to the outside world. They're a technology that takes information from the real world (in a way that's decentralised and reliable) and makes it accessible for other decentralised applications to use. Blockchain oracles like ChainLink are important to the crypto ecosystem because they make blockchain based smart contracts more powerful. ChainLink’s decentralized oracle network provides the same security guarantees as smart contracts themselves. By allowing multiple validators to evaluate the same data before it becomes a trigger, we eliminate any one point of failure and maintain the overall value of a smart contract that is highly secure, reliable, and trustworthy.

Blockchain oracles create data feeds of trusted real world information that can be accessed by other protocols. Let's take the simple example of flight insurance to see how oracles can impact the real world. Etherisc is a decentralised insurance protocol that offers flight insurance. It uses ChainLink oracles to retrieve flight data and automatically checks whether flights were delayed or cancelled. If they were, it pays out the insurance contracts to the people who had purchased flight insurance. While that's a simple example, data feeds from oracle services are also important for decentralised finance, supply chain management, identity documents, sustainability solutions, external payments, gaming and NFT ownership.

ChainLink is the most popular decentralised oracle service in the world, used by many of the most used Dapps and websites in crypto. Already, the decentralised [cryptocurrencies](/trade/cryptocurrencies/) that use LINK as payment to access data from ChainLink's oracles include, Aave, Bancor, Synthetix, PancakeSwap, Synthetix, ENS, Celsius, Arbol, and many more.