Cardano Boasts Best Developer Activity in September, But Blockchain Devs are Fleeing the Space
The Cardano developer community was the most active among crypto projects in September.
- The number of blockchain developers is declining.
- In September, there were just 19,630 active developers in the space.
- In this dwindling cohort, Cardano developers were the most active community of blockchain builders in September.
After years of growth, the number of developers working in the crypto space began to fall in 2022 and has now reached its lowest level since the end of 2020.
However, Cardano appears to be bucking the trend, with the number of contributions to the project’s public GitHub repository hitting 572 in September, more than any other chain.
Comparing Blockchain Development Activity
There are many different approaches to gauging developer activity among blockchain ecosystems.
You could track the number of new applications launched on each blockchain network. Or you could measure the attendance at events and workshops devoted to different technologies.
The blockchain analytics firm Santimant has created useful comparative metrics based on the level of activity on GitHub repositories associated with different crypto projects. For example, the platform can measure activity levels based on the number of unique contributors or the number of events in any given month.
GitHub repositories are essentially caches of files that record all the public information about a given piece of software, including every time its code is updated.
Such changes to the codebase are known as “commits,” but there are also other types of GitHub events that indicate an active development community.
For example, developers can create issues, generate pull requests, and comment on others’ issues and requests. Thus, even if a blockchain project’s codebase doesn’t change, engaged developers can still rack up a high number of events.
Cardano GitHub Events Surge
Based on the number of events on Cardano’s public GitHub repository, the blockchain’s development community has been increasingly active in recent months, rising to the top of the leaderboard in September.
Recording 572 GitHub events in a month, Cardano developers were significantly more active than their peers working on similar projects.
Number of Active Blockchain Devs Falls Below 20,000
Although the Cardano developer community has been especially active lately, the larger picture is one of declining activity.
In a recent post on X, Messari CEO, Ryan Selkis, shared a chart showing that the number of active blockchain developers fell to 19,630 in September.
According to Developer Report ’s annual survey of the global blockchain developer community, 2023 was the first year on record in which the number of active developers shrunk.
As of June 1, 2023, the website reported a 22% yearly decrease in the number of blockchain developers, with declining developer numbers among nearly all major crypto projects.
