Ethereum’s Ecosystem Remains Top Dog In Crypto, Data Shows

Data shows the Ethereum ecosystem has continued to remain number one in terms of development activity, ahead of the likes of BNB and Polygon.

Ethereum Ecosystem Saw 0.8% Growth Over Past Year

In a new post on X, the analytics firm Santiment has discussed how the growth in the development activity for the various cryptocurrency ecosystems has compared against each other over the last twelve months.

The “development activity” here refers to a metric that basically tells us about the total amount of work the developers of a given project are putting in on its official GitHub repository.

In the context of the current discussion, the development activity of any one project isn’t of interest, but rather combined that of the projects that fall under a given blockchain, like Ethereum or BNB. A popular way to gauge development activity of a project is through the number of commits that its developers are making on its repository, but the problem with this methodology is that commits are inherited if the developer forks another project (that is, makes a copy of it).

The commits inherited from the previous project don’t represent the work of the new developer, so the total number of commits can be a misleading metric. Santiment’s version works around this by measuring the development activity in units of “events.”

An event is any change that the developer has made on the project. Under this system, the entire act of forking produces just a single event, with the events of the previous fork not transferring over. Thus, the number of events are able to provide a more accurate representation of the actual work being done by developers.

Now, here is the chart shared by the analytics firm that shows the trend in the combined development activity of the top 15 ecosystems in the sector:

Looks like Ethereum is at the top of the list | Source: Santiment on X

As displayed in the above graph, the development activity of the Ethereum ecosystem has consistently been the highest over the past year. Developers of these projects on the blockchain have also shown an overall rise in effort during this period, with the metric standing 0.8% higher today as compared to one year ago.

This growth, however, is only modest when compared to most of the rest of the top 15. Among these, ecosystems like Optimism and Fantom have particularly stood out with their impressive growths of 39% and 31%, respectively.

Nonetheless, the growth of the rest of the blockchains has posed no threat to Ethereum’s dominance, as the network still has a huge gap over BNB and Polygon in second and third places, respectively.

As for what the relevance of development activity is for any cryptocurrency, a high value of the metric suggests the developers are committed to the project, which can be one of the signs to look out for when determining if an asset has long-term potential, or if it’s just a rug-pull.

Since the development activity here is for entire ecosystems, however, the indicator only tells us about which blockchains are receiving the most interest from developers. For checking on the health of individual coins, their respective development activities must be referred to instead.

ETH Price

At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading at around $2,300, down 1% over the last week.

The price of the coin appears to have gone down over the last few days | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView

Featured image from Dall-E, Santiment.net, chart from TradingView.com