The data shows that the Ethereum ecosystem continued to remain number one in terms of development activity, ahead of the likes of BNB and Polygon.
The Ethereum Ecosystem Has Seen 0.8% Growth Over the Last Year
In a new post on X, the analytics company Santiment discussed how the development activity of cryptocurrency ecosystems compared to the other in the last twelve months.
“Development work” here refers to a metric that basically tells us about the total amount of work that a given project’s developers are doing on their official GitHub repository.
In the context of the current discussion, the development work of any single project is not of interest, but rather it is combined with projects that fall under a given blockchain, such as Ethereum or BNB. A popular way to measure a project’s development activity is the number of commits its developers make to its repository, but the problem with this approach is that commits are inherited when a developer forks over another project (ie, makes a copy of it).
Commits inherited from a previous project do not represent the work of a new developer, so the total number of commits can be a misleading metric. Santiment’s version works around this by measuring development work in units of “events.”
An event is any change a developer makes to a project. Under this scheme, every fork action generates just one event, the events of the previous fork are not overridden. Thus, the number of events is able to provide a more accurate representation of the actual work done by developers.
Now, here’s a chart shared by the analytics company that shows the trend in the combined development activity of the top 15 ecosystems in the industry:
Looks like Ethereum is at the top of the list | Source: Santiment on X
As shown in the graph above, development activity in the Ethereum ecosystem has been at an all-time high over the past year. The developers of these projects on the blockchain also showed an overall increase in effort during this period, with the metric standing at 0.8% more today compared to one year ago.
This growth, however, is very small compared to most of the rest of the top 15. Among these, ecosystems such as Optimism and Fantom stand out especially with their impressive growth of 39% and 31% respectively.
Nevertheless, the growth of other blockchains has not been detrimental to Ethereum’s dominance, as the network still has a large gap over BNB and Polygon in second and third place, respectively.
As for what is the relevance of the work of the development of any cryptocurrency, a high value of the metric suggests that developers are committed to the project, which can be one of the signs to look for when deciding whether the asset has long-term opportunities, or if it is a drag.
Since the development work here is for all ecosystems, however, the index only tells us which blockchains are getting the most interest from developers. In order to assess the health of individual coins, their respective development activities should be addressed.
Trading currency of ETH
At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading 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 from Dall-E, Santiment.net, chart from TradingView.com