 
 
- Cardano developer activity surpassed Solana and Polkadot on Github.
- Santiment notes that tracking developer activity is one way to gauge the growth of a blockchain.
- Cardano’s ecosystem has exploded in activity since it enabled smart contract functionality in 2021.
Blockchains are trying to outdo each other with new developments being unveiled with increasing regularity. One blockchain analytics firm has created a way to judge the growth of blockchains by looking at its developer activity on Github and Cardano appears to be winning.
Cardano thrives over rivals
Santiment, a blockchain analytics company in a report unveiled a new way to judge developer activity of crypto projects. The new method involves tracking the number of events on the blockchain instead of merely looking at the number of commits that may not tell the real story.
The kind of events tracked by Santiment include the number of code pushes, issue interactions, pull request interactions, comments on commits, and the number of repositories opened. A holistic look at events has the benefit of ensuring that small projects do not inherit the events by forking a repository and allowing for greater transparency.
Using this methodology, Santiment’s study notes that Ethereum and Bitcoin are the leading blockchains in terms of developer activity. Cardano shines with a 162.70 score in developer activity over the last 30 days while rivals like Solana and Polkadot have recorded a downtrend in dev activity on Github.
Solana and Polkadot rank far below Cardano and the rest of the top blockchains. In March, data from Santiment indicated that Solana had the highest number of dev activities with a record activity rate of 2228 on the blockchain’s repository. The blockchain recorded a staggering 418.8 Github submissions per day in March but network downtime and other issues have seen Solana’s dev activity decline.
 
 
Santiment’s method of calculating developer activity is widely considered to be accurate because only looking at commits does not paint the real picture. For example, looking only at only the commits would indicate that a lesser-known project like Particl has more Git commits than Ethereum which is misleading.
Buzzing Cardano isn’t slowing down
Cardano’s ecosystem continues to experience a flurry of activity in recent months. At the end of June, the development team reported that the final node required for the Vasil hard fork has been released. Cardano enthusiasts watch with bated breaths as the Vasil hard fork approaches, offering to take the network to the Basho-era that will improve the scalability and interoperability of Cardano.
The hard fork was postponed till the end of July because of “seven non-severe bugs”. Despite the delay, over 5000 DApps are waiting on the sidelines for the hard fork while the team continues to work on other features such as the addition of inline datums, and implementation of reference scripts.
