Facts about web3 projects and their developers you won’t find on the web
The popularity and awareness of web3 are growing hourly — the whole army of specialists from different spheres is working on web3 projects, and the vast majority of them are developers. And as you may already know, most crypto projects are open-sourced, which means that we can easily get a lot of insights about development activities from the available technology-related data.
Although the data is publically available, it’s almost impossible to analyze it manually. But do not worry, we’ve got you covered — Contora’s team has researched top crypto projects’ development activity. We found GitHub profiles for the top 4k crypto projects from CoinMarketСap, and then aggregated the entire history across all repositories.
Below you can discover the insights we found:
1. How many developers are working on web3 projects and how many commits do they push?
On average, 85 developers work on one particular crypto project, and each developer makes an average of ~41.5 commits.
At the same time, ranked #1 developer in development activity made 442,065 commits, and #2 made 131,039 commits — and no, they are not bots as you may think, we’ve double-checked it. The first one is W. J. van der Laan 🥇, second one is Pieter Wuille 🥈, both work on Bitcoin. Is it even legal to push so many commits? :)
Here are the top 50 contributors by the number of commits, the absolute record holders:
2. Which projects have attracted the most contributors so far?
Top projects by the number of engineers for the entire time of their existence:
And here are the top projects by the number of engineers over the past month:
3. Top projects with the highest increase in the number of commits over the past 3 months (DappRadar is leading):
4. On average, one developer works on one particular web3 project for ~6.4 months.
Also, 60.8% of developers work on only 1 project all the time, 21.6% on 2, and 5.5% on 3 projects simultaneously.
5. By the type of project’s blockchain, the absolute leader is Ethereum with 11.8% of developers on its blockchain.
6. A couple of interesting points on the intersection of developers between different projects.
We counted the percentage of common developers of each project compared with other projects, and here are our findings:
- Ethereum is closely related to Cortex (600 common intersected developers), Covalent, and Newton.
- Solana neighbors — Velas and Serum
- Polkadot — obviously Kusama and Compound.
7. Which projects have lost the developers’ support?
Here is a list of forbidden projects and dead coins that had been actively developed before, but now they have <10 commits over the past 3 months:
I hope everyone enjoyed today’s analytics, we’ve been working on collecting and analyzing this data for a long time.
P.S. If you represent a business and would like to access the full dataset with all possible fields (including contacts), please reach out at contora.ai.
Want to see even more insights based on off-chain crypto/web3 data? Let’s make 400 claps here and another analysis goes live! You can actually hold down the clap button all the way until 50 to share your interest :)
