Ethereum Has Highest Number of Blockchain Protocol Developers Says Report

A new report by a Paolo Alto based crypto management firm, Electric Capital, has found ethereum has double the number of active bitcoin core devs, and has the highest number of monthly active developers amongst all cryptos.

The study indexed 21,000 code repositories, de-duplicated 16 million commits to find original code authors and analyzed 130,000 developers across 3,000 crypto blockchain projects.

Total crypto dev activity doubles in two years, March 2019.

They found total protocol dev activity in the crypto space has doubled since 2017 to now more than 4,350 active developers a month.

While price has fallen by 80%-90% for almost all cryptos, dev activity has only fallen by 4%, they say.

Ethereum has the highest number of devs. That’s the case in total activity (featured image), which includes website changes or documentations, but not things like Truffle or dapps. As well as core protocol activity:

Ethereum tops crypto blockchains with the highest number of devs, March 2019.

Bitcoin has 49 active core devs, the analysis says. That excludes Lightning Network, Bitgo and for ethereum it counts only Solidity changes as “core code” with eth having about 100 active core developers each month.

Bitcoin comes just about second in this ranking, with Status quite high. As you know Status is a dapp browser, with a decentralized chat-app and eth wallet functionalities.

They raised about 200,000 eth in an ICO in 2017, with the ethereum based project more of a dapp, rather than a blockchain. Yet appears to have more devs than Tron or EOS.

Cardano and Tron developers are however more efficient, active, or hardworking than eth devs because even though they have less in numbers than eth, they have a bit more commits than eth.

Commits are not a great way of measuring activity as quality does matter, with it unclear what time frame this is using. For total commits, which includes protocol, wallets, docs, etc., ethereum comes on top.

Crypto ranking by total commits, March 2019.

The study also looks at how this dev activity has changed, with bitcoin somewhat stagnant and even slightly declining in the number of devs, while ethereum has seen a clear uptrend in developers.

Dev activity changes over time, Crypto ranking 2019.

Dogecoin has dropped to zero devs for some months according to the report, with a number of bitcoin forks also seeing a fall in dev activity.

A reasonable explanation might be that everyone recognizes the value of smart contracts, so eth forks like EOS, Tron, Cardano and so on might be attracting more attention.

The relationship between dev activity and price, however, isn’t very clear at least in the short term.

While eth has 8x more total commits than bitcoin, it’s market cap is about 1/5th of BTC. Likewise while eth commits are 20x more than Ripple, their market caps are neck and neck.

But the measure does show what project is being developed the most and more importantly what project developers are betting on with their own time and resources, presumably because they think their chosen blockchain has the best chance of succeeding in the long term.