Active Development for Most Bitcoin Forks Evaporates

A report published by Electric Capital has estimated that the number of developers working on public cryptocurrencies has doubled since January 2018. The research found that Ethereum has the largest development team of all established crypto assets, with 216 developers contributing to its codebase each month on average.

Also Read: EY Executive Says Bitcoin Has No Practical Use in India

Report Studies Active Monthly Development Across 3,000 Crypto Assets

The report’s authors indexed more than 21,000 code repos, analyzed 16 million commits, and examined 130,000 developers across approximately 3,000 crypto assets to identify the scale of development regularly taking place among prominent cryptocurrencies.

Electric Capital highlights that the study ignores “commits from integrating open source libraries,” “projects built on Ethereum,” and “code and developer activity from merging changes from the original, forked codebase” with regards to forked cryptocurrencies.”

The report also notes that its findings comprise an under-representation of total development occurring within the sector, as “some of the biggest repos are private, not yet shipped, or not a coin.”

Monthly Development on Crypto Projects Doubles in Two Years

The analysis found that the number of developers contributing to public cryptocurrencies has doubled in approximately two years, with the number of monthly developers growing from 2,190 in Jan. 2017 to 4,352 today.

However, the report shows that the cryptocurrency bear trend has had a slight cooling effect on active development, with monthly active developers falling by 4 percent since the markets’ peak during Jan. 2018. The analysis estimates that more than 4,000 developers currently contribute to approximately 2,800 public on a monthly basis.

Bitcoin Forks Among Projects Witnessing Greatest Decline in Developer Activity

The report finds that forks of the Bitcoin protocol have seen among the greatest recession in active development.

During the last 12 months, monthly Litecoin development fell from 40 to three developers, while Bitcoin Diamond and Bitcoin Gold have both had less than five active developers each month since Oct. 2018.

Dogecoin has had no active developers working on its code for five of the last 10 months.

Ethereum Comprises Most Actively Developed Crypto Asset

When looking at the number of developers contributing to core protocol, Ethereum has the most active development with 99 active developers contributing to the protocol on a monthly basis. BTC ranks second with 47 core protocol developers per month, followed by Cardano and Status.

When analyzing contributions to total code, Ethereum again leads with 216 active developers per month. BTC has the fourth most active development when looking at the total code, with 51 active developers each month, following Cardano and Status.

Are your surprised by the recession in development that has taken place since Jan. 2018? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

At Bitcoin.com there’s a bunch of free helpful services. For instance, have you seen our Tools page? You can even lookup the exchange rate for a transaction in the past. Or calculate the value of your current holdings. Or create a paper wallet. And much more.