The developers of the Cardano project are positioning it as a competitor to Ethereum, while they are preparing for the long-awaited Alonzo update. After its integration, smart contracts will appear on the Cardano network, which will provide decentralized applications, protocols and NFTs with a possible alternative to Eth.
At the same time, the programmers from the team of the founder of the startup Charles Hoskinson really work tirelessly. According to the investment group Outlier Ventures, Cardano is among the top projects in terms of developer activity. And what about the rest of the projects?
Recall that the activity of developers is considered one of the important indicators of the health of a crypto project. However, the more changes and innovations they offer, the more possibilities the blockchain supports. This, in turn, attracts users and investors, thereby affecting the exchange rate of the network’s native token.
Analysts have been evaluating this parameter for a long time. For example, in March 2019, Flipside Crypto representatives reported that Ethereum bypassed Bitcoin in developer activity. Their FCAS indicator helped to draw such conclusions, which, among other things, took into account the number of commits. Note that Bitcoin Cash was already among those catching up among large projects.
Which cryptocurrencies are more reliable
Outlier Ventures experts previously analyzed the development pace of the top 50 blockchains by capitalization from July 2020 to June 2021. Cardano ranked first in the number of commits – that is, operations to change the project code – in the GitHub repositories in one month. The indicator was 701 units. Last year, the figure for the project was almost 24 percent lower, Decrypt reported .
Accordingly, the activity of developers has noticeably gained momentum. And this affects its current and future updates.
Further, the rating is as follows:
- Ethereum: 447 commits
- IOTA : 394 commits
- Filecoin : 368 commits
- Flow : 305 commits.
As we already noted, by the number of commits to the GitHub of the project, you can determine how actively the team is modifying its platform. In the cryptosphere, this metric is usually considered the «life indicator» of individual startups, although it cannot provide a complete picture of blockchain development.
Ethereum and Cardano ranked first and second in terms of the number of active developers per month with 168 and 165 people, respectively. At the same time, projects such as Avalanche, Ocean, Terra and Cosmos were noted for at least a twofold increase in programmer activity in just a year.
In this case, the growth of developers’ activity ended with the growth of the course. For example, the value of Avalanche has increased 194 percent in the past thirty days. At the same time, the token price chart for the last three months looks like this.
Price chart for AVAX, the Avalanche network token
EOS , Bitcoin Cash and TRON stand out among the outsiders in the above-mentioned indicators . The token prices of all three projects rose significantly during the bullish trend, but they fell out of sight of cryptocurrency enthusiasts due to the sharp popularization of the decentralized finance and NFT industry .
Bitcoin Cash does not have the ability to maintain these trends on its platform at all, while EOS and TRON, although they have decentralized applications, still did not become popular this year.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson
The launch of smart contracts at Alonzo will make Cardano a much more flexible project to integrate innovations. However, testing the integration of the upgrade was not without excesses. Earlier, Ethereum developers criticized the work of the first decentralized application on Cardano called Minswap, which soon ceased to work due to «technical difficulties». As it turned out, the whole thing was in the Cardano blockchain: for some reason, the cryptocurrency could process just one application transaction in one block. So there was no talk of mass application of the application at all.
We believe that in the future, much in the project will continue to depend on the activity of the developers. This is especially true now, when trends such as decentralized finance or unique NFT tokens are forcing developers to improve their platforms to support them. Otherwise, the cryptocurrency project risks becoming a part of history and losing the interest of speculators along with long-term investors.
