A new report confirms the industry belief that Ethereum has the largest coding development support of any cryptocurrency.
Despite sitting in the number two spot by market capitalization, and trailing Bitcoin by $55 billion, a report published by crypto management firm Electric Capital on Mar. 7 found that Ethereum has the most developers working on its protocol of all cryptocurrency projects.
Ethereum, helmed by co-founder and industry figurehead Vitalik Buterin, has consistently been one of the top cryptocurrency projects to attract both core and community development, particularly when evaluating its monthly core commits. Research collected by Electric Capital reviewed 20,000 code repositories with 16 million commits to obtain data in their evaluation of different coin projects, determining that Ethereum averages 216 developers contributing code each month. Electric Capital also included in their post that this figure is likely less than the actual number of developers, because their review did not include community-base projects such as Truffle, one of the leading sand boxes for Ethereum and smart contract testing,
“This is undercounting the number of Ethereum developers since we do not include ecosystem projects like Truffle.”
The report also found that Bitcoin has amassed a healthy developer ecosystem, nearly a decade after being launched. While Electric Capital calculated BTC developer support to be 50 per month–around a quarter of what they found for ETH–the company again noted the figure to be likely under-represented, considering they do not account for cryptocurrency wallet projects.
When looking strictly at contributors to both coin’s core protocol, the numbers become more even, albeit with Ethereum still holding a significant lead. Electric Capital reported finding ETH to be “by far” the most active project, averaging 99 monthly core developers–more than twice that of BTC which claimed the second place spot at 47 core devs per month.
Overall, the report is extremely positive on the industry of cryptocurrency and its current development pace. Despite coin prices falling more than 80 percent over the last year, constituting a “crypto winter,” development support has continued to be on the rise. Electric Capital reported that the number of devs working on public coins has doubled in the last two years, with total industry figures being 4,000+ developers per month contributing code to 2,800+ coin projects.
In addition, the report found that development interest has largely been immune to depressed coin prices, a sign of both industry adoption and growing interest,
“Developers who entered the crypto ecosystem have continued to build despite market conditions. From Jan 2018 to Jan 2019, the number of monthly active developers fell 4% while the markets fell more than 80%.”
Electric Capital also found that the majority of abandoned coin projects are currencies forked from existing “high network value coins,” citing Bitcoin Diamond and Bitcoin Gold as both having fewer than 5 developers per month since Oct. 2018. Core protocol development for platform currencies have also drawn the most interest in projects observed, with the report finding 25+ monthly devs for EOS, Cardano and TRON.
With Ethereum trail-blazing the industry in developer support, the cryptocurrency welcomed the launch of its long-awaited Constantinople upgrade two weeks ago.
