Ethereum (ETH) has the most developers working on its base protocol of all cryptocurrencies, not counting community project developers, according to a report by crypto asset management firm Electric Capital. The report was published in a Medium post on March 7.
Per the post, the company fingerprinted over 20,000 code repositories and 16 million commits to obtain data, which reveals that on average 216 developers contribute code to ETH repositories every month. The company also specifies that this data “is undercounting the number of Ethereum developers since we do not include ecosystem projects like Truffle.”
Bitcoin (BTC), the largest of all cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, has a healthy developer base as well, averaging over 50 developers per month. The report specifies that this data does not include ecosystem projects.
An even more restrictive data set, which only considers contributions to core protocol, reveals that:
“Ethereum is by far the most active at 99 monthly developers on average.”
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has an average of 47 core protocol developers every month, making it the second most active.
The data also reveals that big platforms such as Eos (EOS), Tron (TRX) and Cardano (ADA) all have over 25 monthly core protocol developers on average.
Another point made in the report is that while the market lost about 80 percent since its peak, data shows that the monthly active developer base has fallen by only 4 percent. Moreover, according to the report, the number of developers working on public coin repositories has doubled over the last two years.
According to the company’s global data, over 4,000 developers per month contribute code to over 2,800 public coins. As the study notes, this data does not consider private, not yet launched or non-coin projects, such as the Lightning Network.
The report also points out that “many projects who [sic] are being abandoned by developers are forks of high network value coins.” For instance, Dogecoin (DOGE) hasn’t had developers for months while the Litecoin (LTC) developer base has fallen from 40 developers per month to just three over the last year.
The report also notes that both Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) have had code contributions from under five developers since October 2018.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has stated he was trying to solve Bitcoin’s limited functionality with the creation of Ethereum.
On the other hand, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey alluded to spending $10,000 per week on Bitcoin during a recent podcast.