



Measuring a token’s trading volume can give a good idea of investor interest in a particular cryptocurrency. But what about the people who actually make cryptocurrencies? Understanding the interests of developers could hint at future trends in crypto projects.





To measure developer interest, we can look at the number of watchers a crypto token’s primary repo has on GitHub. GitHub is a collaborative coding site, and people often look at the number of “Commits” -- the changes made to a project’s repo -- as a metric for how actively a particular project is being developed.





But we can also view the number of “Watchers” of a project’s primary repo as a measure of more general interest. Watchers are GitHub users who aren’t actively working on the project, but have signed up to be notified any time its codebase is updated. Watching a project’s repo is the sort of thing a developer might do, for example, if they were working on a fork of the coin and wanted to keep abreast of changes to the original codebase.





Of course, the most popular crypto tokens tend to have more Watchers. Bitcoin’s primary repo has more Watchers than any other, and Ethereum ranks second. But other tokens have notably more or less developer interest than you might expect based on their trading volume, and looking at that discrepancy can help highlight which tokens and technologies may be of particular interest to developers.





To measure that discrepancy, we pulled the top 30 cryptocurrencies by confirmed trading volume and GitHub Watcher data from OnChainFX, and cross-referenced where tokens ranked on each list, subtracting a token’s Watcher rank from its volume rank to produce a score. By this metric, a positive score indicates that developers are more interested in a project than we might expect based on its volume. A negative score indicates less interest than expected. A score of 0 indicates that the token is as widely watched as expected: Its volume rank and its Watcher rank are the same.





The chart below indicates the performance of the top 30 coins by volume when it comes to GitHub Watchers.









It should come as no surprise that Bitcoin and Ethereum both scored zero: both have huge numbers of Watchers but also trade in large volume each day. It’s also no surprise that Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV wouldn’t attract much developer interest even though they’re traded at high volumes. Their codebases are very similar to Bitcoin’s, so there’s not much reason to watch their GitHub repos when one can watch Bitcoin’s instead.





More interesting are the tokens with higher-than-expected developer interest. Privacy coins Monero and Zcash both have more GitHub Watchers than you’d expect given their trading volumes, which might suggest that more developers are interested in forking them or creating their own privacy tokens. Positive scores for NEO, EOS, and Qtum suggest that developers are interested in alternative technological approaches to Ethereum’s smart-contract based blockchain.



