Polkadot ($DOT), a blockchain network often described as a “blockchain of blockchains,” has recently become the leading cryptocurrency network by development activity after surpassing Cardano ($ADA).
According to data shared by on-chain analytics firm Santiment, Polkadot’s development activity, along with that of its pre-production network Kusama, over the last 30 days was superior to that of the smart contract platform Cardano.
Development activity, it’s worth noting, is a metric measuring the development activity in projects’ public GitHub repositories, and does not include private repositories’ work.
Santiment tracks development events instead of just GitHub commits, as according to the firm its methodology “successfully avoids” specific pitfalls, which for example include projects forking others to “inherit” their commits and contributions.
An “event” refers to actions on the platform like pushing a commit, creating an issue, creating a pull request, forking the repository, and others.
A simple count of total commits would then not accurately reflect the activity of a developer who created a fork, as they would not be responsible for the work done by the original team. With Santiment’s “events” metric, a fork counts as one event.
While Cardano came in third place by development activity, the cryptocurrency led the ranking last year. It still towers above larger cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, including Ethereum ($ETH) and $BNB.
Behind it were various other notable cryptocurrencies including Decentraland ($MANA), Status ($SNT), Cosmos ($ATOM), Filecoin ($FIL), and Internet Computer ($ICP).
As CryptoGlobe reported, Polkadot saw its active user numbers surge 300% amid last year’s cryptocurrency market rout. Polkadot’s main blockchain, called the relay chain, does not support smart contracts, but other blockchains connected to it can support them.
As a result, Polkadot is expected to become a growing ecosystem of cryptocurrencies that competes with other smart contract networks such as Ethereum, the BNB Chain, and more. It was launched in 2020 and brings a number of technical features that help it reach its goal.
DOT is the native cryptocurrency of the Polkadot network and serves as its governance token. DOT holders can stake their tokens to vote on network upgrades and help decide the future of Polkadot by actively participating in its governance, according to CryptoCompare.
Notably, over the past 30 days both ADA and DOT have had similar performances, with the first moving up 43.2% and the latter moving up 41%, according to CryptoCompare data.
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