Data shows that the Ethereum ecosystem still holds the number one spot in terms of development activity, far surpassing competitors like BNB and Polygon.
Ethereum Ecosystem Grows 0.8% Over the Past Year
In a recent article on X, analytics firm Santiment discussed the growth in development activity of cryptocurrency ecosystems compared to each other over the past twelve months.
The “development activity” we're talking about here refers to a metric that shows the total amount of work that a project's developers Chia on its official GitHub repository.
In the context of the current discussion, the development activity of a particular project is not of concern, but the aggregate of projects belonging to a given blockchain , such as Ethereum or BNB. A common way to measure the development activity of a project is through the number of commits that developers make to its repository, but this method has the problem that the number of commits can be inherited if a developer copies another project (i.e. creates a clone).
Commits inherited from previous projects do not reflect the work of new developers, so the total number of commits can be a misleading metric. Santiment's version gets around this problem by measuring development activity through “event” units.
An event is any change a developer makes to a project. Under this system, the entire copy action only generates a single event, events from previous copies are not transferred. Therefore, the event count can provide a more accurate view of the actual work that developers are doing.
Now, here is a chart Chia by the analytics firm showing trends in aggregate development activity across the top 15 ecosystems in the industry:
Looks like Ethereum is at the top of the list | Source: Santiment on X
As the chart above shows, the Ethereum ecosystem’s development activity has consistently remained at an all-time high over the past year. Developers on the blockchain have also shown an overall increase in effort during this time, with the index currently 0.8% higher than a year ago.
However, this growth is modest compared to most of the other ecosystems in the top 15. Among them, ecosystems like Optimism and Fantom stand out with impressive growth of 39% and 31% respectively.
Still, the growth of the remaining blockchains does not pose any threat to Ethereum's dominance, as the network still maintains a large gap with BNB and Polygon in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively.
As for the importance of development activity for any cryptocurrency, a high value of this indicator shows that developers are committed to the project, which can be one of the important signs to determine whether an asset has long-term potential or is simply a scam.
However, since development activity here refers to entire ecosystems, this metric only tells us which blockchains are receiving a lot of attention from developers. To check the health of individual coins, the respective development activity of each coin should be consulted.
ETH Price
At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading at around $2,300, down 1% over the past week.
Coin price seems to have dropped over the past few days | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView
