Shocking Github Data Reveals the real State of Many Blockchain Projects

Over $700 million is sitting in dead projects

Published in

aelf

4 min readOct 21, 2019

It is without a doubt that there are more projects than necessary listed on many sites such as coinmarketcap.com. The number of cryptocurrencies listed is just shy of 3,000 although many people rarely look past the first page showing the top 100 projects ranked by market cap. Even then, there are some unknown projects listed on this first page with unusually high market caps adding to the question of how to really measure the success of a project.

New data revealed in a study by CoinCodeCap, a code analysis and reporting team, have shown a greater extent of just how well poor or dead projects can still appear when not compared accurately. Published in late Sept, the analysis looked at over 2,000 cryptocurrencies, specifically focusing on their GitHub activity in 2019.

Of the projects reviewed, over 1 in 4 did not commit a single line of code in 2019, begging the question if these projects were, in fact, dead. There were 640 projects with some not having received any updates in over 5 years.

Even more staggering were the findings that many of these projects still had million dollar market caps. The team could only receive market cap stats for 299 or less than half of these ‘questionably’ dead projects, but even these amounted to $415 million, and would rank 25 on CoinMarketCap. Proton sat at the top of this list with a market cap of almost $85 million alone. This raises even more questions, does this indicate life in these projects from the community, or are these figures faked, or is it simply the remains, skeletons of once successful projects?

Coincodecap has taken this analysis one step further by documenting which exchanges list these questionable projects. Yobit Exchange sits at the top with 1 in 10 of these projects listed on the exchange with many other exchanges listing between 10 and 40 projects. Even the larger exchanges are not immune with some of them like Binance DEX and Huobi listing 1 or 2 of these projects.

Coincodecap also actively lists the top projects based upon Github activity. This list is quite different to lists ranked by market cap, with Ethereum sitting at the top of the list in overall ranking. Activity ranking over the last week is even more contrasted with Stellar being the only project that ranks in the top 10 in both market cap as well as activity ranking.

The overall ranking takes into account multiple data points, including commits, forks, stars, watchers and active authors. Purely based on commit activity in the last year, aelf sits at 6th with 12,574 commits, and 25th in overall ranking.

This data shows how deceptive market caps and trading volume can be in regards to the progress a project may or may not be making. An active github repository is just one of the many aspects that make up a successful project. The total list of 1240 Dead Projects according to coincodecap has a market cap of over $700 million. Imagine if we put this money into active and thriving projects.