There has been some FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) regarding Litecoin’s Github commits activity recently. Most of it perpetrated by this article which claims that Litecoin’s developments is becoming more inactive which is untrue. Whilst Github commits activity do show individual changes to files or sets of files within each project, it is only one small fraction of the Github activity that can be measured and certainly does not show the whole development for any given project.

This article will ultimately defeat the FUD surrounding Litecoin’s developments and will attempt to paint a bigger picture to those people that have fallen victim to this misleading article and claims thereafter.

Let’s delve into three important points.

1. Github Commits ≠ Development

The term development can be broadly defined as “a process of writing and maintaining the source code” (Perry, 2009). It includes everything to do with the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, often in a planned and structured process. The one thing to note about Github commits is that it does not capture the whole code construction from start to finish; only what’s been pushed to the master branch for the main repositories. This means that the process of writing or testing new code is not included in this measurement. Thus, it is important to note that Github commits do not show an accurate representation of the actual development of any given project.

Typically, developers commit code when they are finished working on them in their own branches and submit pull requests to the main repositories — this is considered to be a good developer practice. However, most cryptocurrency projects are working straight from the Master branch which carries with it some potential risks. Firstly, it inflates the amount of Github commits causing the project to seem more active than it actually is which is the case for many in the previously mentioned report. Secondly, working straight from the Master can also lead to the potential disruption of the source code which might damage the already existing infrastructure built. Thirdly, people and/or businesses compiling from the source code would get whatever random state your current development is at.

Because of all these reasons, Litecoin does not use master for staging changes — instead master is supposed to be the latest release. Litecoin Github commits are also synced from the core developers’ forked repositories. Since there is very little difference between the Bitcoin Core and Litecoin Core client, we have merged most Litecoin related commits into a few commits and when a new release of Bitcoin Core is tagged, we pull the changes from upstream and pick our commits (and fix merge conflicts). The result is that Litecoin Github commits seem to be decreasing lately but this is is due to the fact that we have been streamlining our development much more effectively and efficiently in a more structured way, and not because development is inactive as will be discussed further in points 2 and points 3.

2. Litecoin doesn’t need to constantly make new innovations

Whilst it is important for cryptocurrencies like Litecoin to strive for innovation and adapt to changing market conditions, the platform in which it operates in is open source. Open source enables many different developers and projects to collaboratively work together and this allows for very efficient and effective problem solving solutions. Because of this, it is impossible for any one cryptocurrency to achieve sustainable competitive advantage through innovation because any other project can just pull or fork the commits and replicate the exact same source code.

Obviously, having many developers actively working on any given project is beneficial but the results are automatically shared with everyone. For this reason, Litecoin doesn’t need to constantly strive to make new innovations to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Of course, certain tweaks to the source code and regular infrastructure upgrades are needed to avoid any malfunctions, but Litecoin has been worked on for more than 7 years (more than 98% of other cryptocurrencies in this market) and has built a strong foundation on its development history already.

To put this in perspective, let’s look at the whole Github activity of Litecoin to show the bigger picture in comparison to a few other cryptocurrencies:

Litecoin

37 repositories:

56,055 total commits

150 total branches

818 total releases

1,706 total contributors

Bitcoin

4 repositories:

21,490 total commits

15 total branches

243 total releases

805 total contributors

Ethereum

188 repositories:

187,930 total commits

1,342 total branches

2,355 total releases

3,665 total contributors

Bitcoin Cash (including bitcoincashorg & bitcoin xt)

11 repositories:

37,328 total commits

155 total branches

229 total releases

1,382 total contributors

It makes sense for Ethereum to have more Github activity than both Bitcoin and Litecoin since the goal of Ethereum is to build developer applications so more code is needed to build on this new growing platform infrastructure. But Litecoin’s goal isn’t to build a decentralized developer application platform like the Ethereum project; the goal is to become a method of exchange that compliment’s Bitcoin store of value proposition. Thus, it makes sense that Litecoin should follows Bitcoin’s core developments closely. But let’s look deeper into the Litecoin Github activity to show how development has grown over 7+ years.

Historical developments for Litecoin Core since 2011: