Chainlink tokens surged Thursday as wealthy investors swapped ether for link (LINK) following the release of the company’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) earlier this week, data shows.

LINK exchanged hands for $8 around midday in Europe as trading volume more than doubled to $580 million, helping extend weekly gains to over 25%.

On-chain data shows some whales – or large holders of an asset – added upward of $6 million to their link holdings during the morning, with the increased demand lifting prices as much as 6%.

CCIP is designed to help build cross-chain applications and services. It was being tested by at least 25 partners that are now beginning to move to the mainnet, and was pushed live for early access users on the Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon blockchains.

On Thursday, CCIP will become available to all developers across five testnets: Arbitrum Goerli, Avalanche Fuji, Ethereum Sepolia, Optimism Goerli and Polygon Mumbai.

Prices of some other oracle protocols also rose, CoinGecko data shows. In the past 24 hours, Band Protocol’s BAND added 9% while Uma’s UMA and API3 both jumped 5.4%.

Oracles are blockchain-based services that fetch data from outside a blockchain. Blockchains, by design, are immutable stores of data, but can’t verify the veracity of information. This is where oracle networks like Chainlink help – they refer multiple sources of information to provide reliable data to blockchain-based services and products for users.