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Developer Activity: The Best Metric for Comparing Blockchain Platforms

By: Everychain

With DeFi’s emergence as the next wave of fintech and businesses beginning to leverage blockchain tech into their existing businesses, everyone wants to monitor the growth potential of various blockchains. Crypto analysts have been using Total Value Locked (TVL) as a metric to do this, which tracks the total amount of capital locked in a blockchain’s smart contracts. However, TVL can be a highly misleading metric despite its widespread use. This is because many projects within a blockchain’s ecosystem have a short-lived peak and they collapse in no time, hence it does not reflect the long-term success of a blockchain. A lesser-known but more reliable metric of a platform’s performance and potential is tracking the developer activity within its ecosystem.

Why development activity?

Development work on a project is time-consuming and requires capital, so development activity can be a good indicator of how serious the blockchain is about its value proposition and how likely it is to grow and develop. This can be crucial information when investing in a cryptocurrency or opting to develop on a certain blockchain.

Let’s look at some of the best ways to measure the development activity for comparing blockchains.

One metric is the number of developers working on the project — the developer count. While TVL can give some insight to the volume of users betting on a platform, a high developer count would explicitly tell you that ample brains are working on and contributing to the ecosystem. Additionally, as blockchains are usually open-source with public repositories on GitHub, they can be easily tracked. According to a recent report published by Electric Capital, approximately 8,000 developers are working on various blockchain projects. Ethereum has a huge lead with roughly 2,300 average active developers per month. The number of active developers on Ethereum has grown by a whopping 215% in the last 3 years. Polkadot is the next largest with about 400 average active developers monthly. According to the report, Polkadot’s developer count saw a 100% rise in 2020. Polkadot’s growth can be attributed to the ease of upgrading chains due backward-compatibility support, which saves developers from forking. Moreover, there is considerable growth in the total number of developers entering Web3, which overall underscores the promise for the DeFi ecosystems in the coming years.

But developer count is not the only viable metric. Another good indicator can be development events. This does not just mean total commits made to the main chain; this again can be an unreliable indicator. For example, consider a project update forking Ethereum's source code. The fork will include all the changes and commits made on the Ethereum main chain up until that point. Hence, even if the project makes additional commits in the forked branch, the total commits will also include all of Ethereum’s original commits, which would give a completely skewed read. As a result, there is a need to measure development events differently. A well-grounded approach can be to look at the number of Github events that the project generates. A commit push generates an event, but there are other ways to do so as well. That includes: Issue creation, pull request, commenting, forking a repository, and so on. In terms of GitHub events, forking will generate a single event instead of generating an event for every commit that gets inherited. Another advantage with this approach is that it will include not just committed code, but also reporting issues and discussions on code changes, which are an integral part of development activity. According to an analysis done by Santiment — a crypto market intelligence platform — Ethereum again takes the lead, followed by other popular platforms like Bitcoin, Cardano, and Steem. Santiment also found that ERC20 tokens have the most development events across all blockchain platforms. This is a clear indicator that a huge amount of brainpower is being dedicated to the ETH platform.

In conclusion, tracking development activity across open-source projects is a fairly easy and effective way to understand the prospects of a platform, judging whether or not it is trustworthy and should be considered when placing bets with your time or money on any blockchain.

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