Cardano ($ADA), a secure, decentralized proof-of-stake blockchain designed to solve various problems while being informed by scholarly academic research, has led the cryptocurrency market in developer activity last year, according to a recently published report.
According to crypto analytics firm Santiment, led in developer activity last year and was followed by Kusama and Polkadot. Kusama, it’s worth noting, is a “public pre-production environment for Polkadot,” allowing developers to experiment and test new blockchains and applications in a real economic environment.
Next came Ethereum, Gnosis, and Solana. Included in the top 20 were also Cosmos, Elrond, IOTA, Flow, Celo, Chainlink, and Decentraland, among others. Developer activity, it’s worth noting, is measured according to a project’s public GitHub repository, with GitHub being a code hosting platform for collaboration.
In its report, Santiment noted that developer activity has “little to no impact on short-term market trends,” but sees it as “quite an underrated indicator of project success, as it demonstrates the team’s month-to-month commitment to creating a working product, polishing and upgrading its features, and staying true to the long-term roadmap.”
The firm clarified that while it tracks development data form thousands of public GitHub repositories it excludes specific non-development events like releases being downloaded, comments on commits, and people following issues. These are excluded as their inclusion could see some projects “show inflated development activity just by discussing what they are going to build without actually building it.”
The firm also tracked active contributors to projects’ GitHub repositories. It found that Cardano led the pack with an average of 53 daily contributors throughout 2021, and was followed by Kusama, Polkadot, Ethereum, and Solana. The Trust Wallet Token and Filecoin made it to the top 20 in daily contributors, it’s worth noting.
The three main organizations supporting Cardano, it’s worth noting, are the Cardano Foundation, IOHK, and Emurgo. These firms work to develop the project and to support its promotion and commercial adoption as well.
As CryptoGlobe reported, the number of ADA wallets has grown over 1,200% year-over-year from 190,000 to 2.5 million, showing that adoption of the cryptocurrency’s network has been steadily growing, partly thanks to the implementation of smart contracts.
Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard has published a blog post looking back at 2021 as a “year of incredible growth” for the cryptocurrency network.
According to Gregaard, 2021 was a year in which the Cardano protocol “sustained growth, technical innovation, community expansion, and partnerships” that helped it move forward. The CEO highlighted some on-chain developments which to him mean adoption has grown.
Notably, the number of active addresses on the Cardano network quadrupled from October to November as on-chain activity picked up and transaction fees on the network dropped from $0.45 to $0.38 on average.
According to CryptoCompare’s recent Asset Report, in October there were 50,506 active addresses on the Cardano blockchain, while in November there were a total of 216,072 active addresses.
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