Data shows that the Ethereum ecosystem continues to remain number one in terms of development activity, ahead of BNB and Polygon.
The Ethereum ecosystem has grown by 0.8% over the past year
In a new article on X, analytics firm Santiment has explained how the growth in development activity across different cryptocurrency ecosystems has compared to each other over the past twelve months.
“Development activity” here refers to a metric that essentially tells us about the total amount of work that developers of a given project are doing on its official GitHub repository.
In the context of the current discussion, the development activity of a project is not of interest, but rather the combined development activity of the projects that fall under a given blockchain, such as Ethereum or BNB. A common way to assess the development activity of a project is to measure the number of commits its developers make to its repository, but the problem with this methodology is that commits are inherited if the developer creates another project (i.e., effectively a copy).
Commits inherited from the previous project do not represent the work of the new developer, so the total number of commits can be a misleading metric. Santiment’s version gets around this by measuring development activity in units of “events”.
An event is a change made by the developer to the project. In this system, the act of forking produces only one event, as events from the previous fork are not carried over. Thus, the number of events helps provide a more accurate representation of the actual work done by developers.
Now here is the chart shared by the analyst firm that shows the trend of the combined development activity of the 15 main ecosystems in the sector:
Looks like Ethereum is at the top of the list | Source: Santiment on X
As the chart above shows, development activity in the Ethereum ecosystem has consistently been the highest over the past year. Developers of these projects on the blockchain have also shown an overall increase in their efforts during this period, with the metric being 0.8% higher today compared to a year ago.
This growth remains modest, however, compared to most other ecosystems in the top 15. Among these, ecosystems such as Optimism and Fantom particularly stood out with their impressive growth of 39% and 31%, respectively.
However, the growth of the rest of the blockchains has not posed a threat to Ethereum’s dominance, as the network still has a huge gap over BNB and Polygon, in second and third place respectively.
As for the relevance of development activity for any cryptocurrency, a high value of the metric suggests that developers are engaged with the project, which can be one of the signs to look out for to determine if an asset has long-term potential, or if it is just a draw.
Since the development activity here concerns entire ecosystems, the indicator only tells us which blockchains are generating the most interest from developers. To check the health of individual cryptocurrencies, we should instead refer to their respective development activities.
ETH Price
At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading at around $2,300, down 1% from last week.
The price of the coin appears to have gone down over the last few days | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView
Featured image by Dall-E, Santiment.net, chart by TradingView.com
