Cryptocurrency Development Analytics (2019/2020)
Crypto is disruptive space, which means a lot of development work is around this industry, but, sometimes new coin arrives on market promising state of the art technology. Without proper research, you could end buying a scam coin. How do you know which coins are focusing on development? Great thing about cryptocurrencies is that almost all of them are open source(either their SDK, node or their wallets). I combined all data about top 100 coins on market. Let’s see the data!
Intro
The top coins are collected using Coinpaprika API (thank you for providing a free API). For each coin, there is a Github link to their source code — either SDK, Node, Wallet etc..
The coins without Github (like tether) are removed from list, also, if some coin has multiple repos, I’am pulling only the top repo for that coin(which is either their SDK, Node or Wallet).
Once we have a Github repo, we can start to look at their activity about code changes over a period of 1 year. NOTE: I’am looking only on master branch. I’am not collecting commits on other branches since I’am only interested what’s get pushed to main code repo.
The Big Boys
Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple are market leaders on market cap. Let’s take a closer look about their development.
Surprised? :) Bitcoin development is at full speed if we are comparing Ethereum or XRP. The top Bitcoin weekly commits were on October 2019. Almost 80 commits per week! Ethereum is following that line — by the end of May 2019 they were doing more commits than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin
For Bitcoin, October and November 2019 was months of high commits. Interesting, February 2019 and February 2020 is low.
Ethereum
Similar to Bitcoin, Ethereum high volume of commits were on November 2019. If we look more closely to distribution of commits — March, April and May 2019 is were most of the commits are coming from.
Ripple
While Bitcoin and Ethereum most of commits were coming from October/November, Ripple is different. Most of the commits were received on August 2019. But, the next biggest distribution of commits were on October.
We can see a pattern here: October 2019 and November 2019 are definitely winners for amount of commits going to master branch.
All coins
Holo and Lisk coins are the leaders here. From a 1 year period, almost ~6000 commits to master branch. This is around ~16 commits per day. This is a lot and it’s great to see that development is pushed hard on these coins.
You don’t see your coin on the list? This means either they don’t have a Github or there was no development on their repo in period of 1 year. This is a red flag for me.
Investment advice?
Personally, I don’t give investment advice on which coin to invest. From my personal view, when I see some coin that gets pushed to the top 100, I always check their development work. If development is not driving that coin then I would not touch it. Take it this way: would you invest in Facebook if they stop with developing new features and bug fixes? Or would you invest in Uber if their app stops working because of location bug on the phone? Remember Software is never finished — it only gets abandon.
Final words
While there is a lot of data we can look at, this does not represent a real word experience what is going on. For example, each commit represents something — is it a Feature or Bug fix? Also, a lot of development happens in other branches (not only the master branch). Maybe, this is something we can look next time and compare which coins have most of the bug fixes and/or which coins are getting released much faster than others. Thoughts?
