How dead is your coin?

Lucas Bruxxx
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

To be successful in the long run, crypto coins need to be constantly developed, bugs need to be fixed, scalability issues resolved and so on and so forth. I don’t believe in the “we are done with the development” mentality: Either you keep developing your full node software, or your coin is dead.

We can therefore, in a totally unscientific way (but more scientific than most other ways), try to relate the value of a coin with its development. We are mostly interested in quality development; from my own development experience over the years, I know that you need many eyes to produce high-quality software. In a healthy project, many developers from different parties and in different roles will be involved in creating software — users will create pull-requests to fix bugs, core developers will heavily work on the internals, front end developers will submit pull requests to make their work easier etc. pp. In short, almost every healthy software project will have a relatively large group of people actively contributing things to the project.

Therefore, the metric we are going to use is the number of developers who have contributed to the repository containing the blockchain full node in the last month. Is this the best metric ever? Probably not, because projects differ in their collaboration structure, in what is stored in which repository and so on. And still, I found the following table quite insightful. It compares the monthly active developers to the market cap, and calculates a magic value that is supposed to relate the two (since we assume market cap grows exponentially with project size, we take its logarithm and set the 0-point to be the minimal logarithm in the table, then dividing the number of developers by that value to get the magic value).

I included in the analysis all the top coins as well as some coins that got some decent discussion on reddit lately.

The conclusions are rather simple: Bitcoin cash, ethereum classic, dogecoin, bytecoin, bitconnect, vertcoin and ark are pretty much dead — there is no developer community around them, at best, there are 1 or 2 solitary souls changing stuff in the repository.

The big ones that are also listed by coinbase — Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum — are looking good.

There are some surprises though: EOS and Steem are pretty amazingly active lately; SiaCoin and Factom also score surprisingly high given their market share. Lisk, Waves and Stratis also feature good development activitiy; Monero is very solid, Ripple and Dash slightly less so.

Don’t go out and buy the high scoring coins immediately now. But if you own coins from one of the very low scoring — you should maybe rethink your investment.

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