Although the market is down, interest in bitcoin among developers isn’t. A recent study shows that it has increased by more than 8% since the peak nearly a year ago. After conducting “health checks on 3 top blockchain ecosystems,” the data science team at Telstra Ventures came to the conclusion that “open-source developers signal strength of web3 community.” But bitcoin is the main focus of this tale. which, although not truly a part of the “web3 community,” is a topic for another day.
The study’s introduction mentions the catastrophes at Celsius and Three Arrows Capital, as well as the collapse of Terra. It omits to mention another factor contributing to the decline: Tesla’s panic sale of 75% of its bitcoin. Telstra stated, “Since January, a 60% decline in the value of the cryptocurrency market has erased $1.3 trillion, and venture capital investments have dropped 25.6% to roughly $9.3 billion from a record $12.5 billion invested in the first half of last year.”
However, there is still a lot of interest among developers in Solana, Ethereum, and bitcoin. “Developers’ decisions about which protocols to use will be driven by use case and will point to the winning protocols,” states Yash Patel, General Partner of the company.
Developers’ Interest in Bitcoin
Telstra played down the phenomenon and buried the lead. According to the report, “the number of active developers on Bitcoin has grown steadily over the past eight years.” In actuality, since the network’s founding thirteen years ago, developer interest in it has been steadily increasing. The network’s rhythm can be described as “Bitcoin continues slow and steady growth through price volatility.”
“Over the past four years, since January 1, 2018, the number of contributors to Bitcoin has increased at a compound annual growth rate of 17.1%.”
Taking into account that bitcoin is attempting to function as money rather than a global computer of any kind, it doesn’t require as much development. Remember that the network is far older than Solana and Ethereum as well. This next bullet point is even more remarkable in light of those two facts.
“The number of active contributors has increased by 8.2% since the peak price of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in October 2021.”
In the same time frame, Solana’s “number of active contributors has declined 21.0%” and Ethereum’s developer interest saw “a drawdown of 9.0%.” It makes sense. Even so, those figures are not terrible given that the market is most likely in a bear market.
Additionally, take into account the developer interest in “Ethereum is growing 24.9% compound annual growth rate” and “Solana is growing 173.0% compound annual growth rate” during the same time period. It makes sense, given that altcoins typically perform well in bull markets like the one we had previously.
Telstra’s study includes Stacks projects, unrelated to Bitcoin. Bitcoin operates independently from other cryptocurrencies. Zeus Lightning, Sparrow Wallet, and Galoy’s projects exhibit significant Bitcoin development interest.
BTC price chart for 08/19/2022 on Coinbase | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com
The Methods of the Study
It’s critical to note the methodology used by the Telstra Ventures data science team to determine those developer interest figures.
They analyzed 1,000 active organizations contributing to over 30,000 open-source projects on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana in the Web3 ecosystem. The research is comprehensive, requiring relevant GitHub repositories to have at least 100 stars and demonstrate active contributions from January to April 2022.
As a result, the study has limitations and only takes into account developer interest in completed projects.
They tabulated monthly active contributors by counting the unique contributors to the repository within a month. The organisational level tallied the total number of unique contributors who committed to any organic repos in a given month. The tally counted the total number of unique contributors to all organic repos within a Web3 ecosystem in a given month.
The study heavily relies on GitHub, disregarding interest from developers on non-GitHub projects. It calculates the “GitHub activity growth rate” by combining one-month and twelve-month changes in stars, forks, commits, and unique contributors for each repository.
Perfect. Recognised.
To sum up, there is still a lot of interest among developers in the three blockchains under study. But following the crash, it only kept expanding on bitcoin. It makes sense, as the creators of bitcoin are motivated by goals beyond monetary gains. The goal of Bitcoin is to keep money and state apart, and market fluctuations have no bearing on this goal. Next block, tick tock.
