A new report published on March 7 by crypto asset management firm Electric Capital reveals that Ethereum (ETH) has the largest number of developers working on their base protocol out of all cryptocurrencies.
Per the report, the company fingerprinted over 20,000 code repositories and 16 million commits in order to compile sufficient data for their Q1 2019 Developer Report.
The first finding highlighted by the report is that the number of developers working on public coins has doubled in the last 2 years. Delving deeper, the report states that over 4,000 developers per month contribute code across 2,800 different cryptocurrencies.
While this is a lot of development, it’s not even the full picture as some of the most actively developed blockchain projects are private, un-launched coins, or are not coins at all.
For instance, Binance Coin (BNB) is one of the most active project, but is private. Coda is an active, un-launched cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin’s lightning network is an active project but not a coin. These types of projects are plentiful in the space and are not included in Electric Capital’s report.
Ethereum (ETH) Has Twice the Development as Bitcoin (BTC)
Per Electic Capital’s developer data analysis, Ethereum has the biggest developer team in crypto, with an average of 216 developers contributing code to Ethereum’s repositories every month. The report notes that this is even when undercounting the number of Ethereum developers because they did not include projects like Truffle.
The report also highlights an even more restrictive data set that looks only at developer contributors to the core protocol.
Using this metric, Electric Capital found that:
“Ethereum is by far the most active at 99 monthly developers on average.”
As for Bitcoin’s development, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, the report states that it is very healthy for being a 10-year old project. In fact, Bitcoin is still being heavily developed after all this time, and sees an average of more than 50 developers contribute to Bitcoin’s repositories per month.
Looking at the more restrictive data set, Bitcoin has an average of 47 core developers every month, making it the second most actively developed core protocol in the space.
Moreover, the report notes that they also underpin the number of Bitcoin developers because they exclude projects like wallets and the lightning network.
Other Crypto Projects’ Development
Apart from Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), the report highlighted a few other projects with a high level of core protocol development. Projects with 25 or more monthly core protocol developers include other big smart contract and dapp development platforms like EOS (EOS), Cardano (ADA) and Tron (TRX).
As for projects that have seemingly fallen off the map in terms of development, the report notes that they tend to be forks of high network value coins.
For instance, Dogecoin (DOGE) has had no developers for consecutive months, and forks like Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) have had fewer than 5 developers per month since October 2018.
All in all, Electric Capital’s report highlights some interesting points while shining light on the development going on in the crypto industry. For instance, one more tidbit of information is that the entire crypto ecosystem as a whole has continued to build despite market conditions.
As stated in the report:
“From Jan 2018 to Jan 2019, the number of monthly active developers fell 4% while the markets fell more than 80%.”
As we move through 2019, do you think Bitcoin and Ethereum will have more developers, or will other projects rise up to their level? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
