A Year in Crypto: Santiment’s 2021 Market Report - Santiment Community Insights
Devs, DeFi and Down the line
While it has little to no impact on short-term market trends,
development activity is quite an underrated indicator of project success, as it demonstrates the team’s month-to-month commitment to creating a working product, polishing and upgrading its features, and staying true to the long-term roadmap. At Santiment, we track development data from
1000s of public github repositories, while excluding various ‘non-dev events’, like comments on commits, people following an issue, downloading releases etc. If such events weren’t excluded, some projects could show inflated development activity just by discussing what they are going to build without
actually building it. With that it mind, below is a list of
top 20 projects by aggregated development activity - based on their publicly available Github information - for the year 2021:
Top 20 projects by total development activity in 2021 (Source: Sanbase)
As evident, the top 3 projects -
Cardano, Kusama and Polkadot are virtually neck and neck, followed by
Ethereum at #4 and
Gnosis at #5. For the first time on one of these end-of-year development reports, we also have an NFT-centric project in
Flow to round out the top 10, highlighting the meteoric growth of the NFT sector in the last year. Outside of ‘pure’ development activity, we also track the amount of
active contributors to any project’s Github repo, for broader insights about their ‘developer network’. Below are the industry leaders in the amount of active Github contributors over the last 12 months:
Top 20 projects by the average amount of Github contributors in 2021 (Source: Sanbase)
While the top positions remain unchanged, Cardano now towers above the rest, with an average of
53 daily contributors to their Github repo throughout the last year. The amount of active contributors also sees a few interesting changes within the top 10, which now includes the Trust Wallet Token and Filecoin, to name a few. The above list(s), however, look at the entire crypto landscape, meaning large projects with active developer communities are naturally going to dominate. As such, it’s also a good idea to zoom in on the particular segments of the crypto market and shine a light on the more ‘niche projects’ that invested heavily in their coding manpower in 2021.
With over $103bn locked in various DeFi protocols (+292.8% increase in 2021),
decentralized finance remains one of the bedrocks of the crypto industry, acting as the primary hub for both large-scale innovation and mainstream adoption. And while competing narratives and new (actually old) industry trends took some of the spotlight away from DeFi in 2021, the sector has continued to make headway thanks to sidechains, bridges and layer2 solutions, evolving into a robust,
multi-chain ecosystem that didn’t exist just a year prior. With that in mind, here are the top 20 DeFi-related projects that
lead the way in development activity (based on public Github repository data) in 2021:
Top 20 DeFi projects by total development activity in 2021 (Source: Sanbase)
Interestingly enough,
DeFiChain claims the top spot for the year, followed by Mdex and SifChain. Far less surprising is the rest of the list, populated by some of the year’s most utilized protocols, including Uniswap and its BSC counterpart PancakeSwap, Balancer, Yearn and Maker.
AND THE QUESTION IS...WHERE IS DashCoreGroup ON ALL THE ABOVE??????
AFTER BEING PAID $13 millions?