The code for Bitcoin was published in April 2009. The number of projects on GitHub related to blockchain has grown significantly, averaging more than 8,600 new projects a year. In 2016 alone, there were almost 27,000 new cryptocurrency and blockchain projects.

In 2010, organizations developed less than 1 percent of all projects. By 2017, their blockchain projects accounted for 11 percent (organizations currently account for 7 percent of total—not just blockchain—software development on GitHub).

Projects that organizations have developed have resulted in new platforms (such as Ethereum, Ripple, Corda, and Quorum) which some developers now use to build applications. Organization-owned projects also tend to be updated more frequently than those developed by users, and are reportedly five times more likely to be copied, implying that the blockchain community has deemed them most relevant.

Organization-led projects are the backbone code for thousands of other projects.

Tools for enabling crowdsales and initial coin offerings (ICOs) are often connected to projects in large blockchain subcommunities: projects developing content for smart contracts, escrow accounts, and the core code behind Ethereum in the Go language. Not surprisingly, this seems to align with the predilection of many ICOs being offered on top of the Ethereum blockchain.