Tracking developer activity on crypto projects is a good indicator for long-term success. This is not financial advice, but serious considerations need to be made when a project has no developers…
Covered:
- Why Developers Are Important
- Abandoned Crypto Projects
- Why Open Source Is Important
Why Developers Are Important
Let’s be honest, crypto projects that have minmal/zero developer activity are definitely suspect. To stay competitive in the blockchain space, projects need to constantly “evolve” their code and fix bugs that come up in the software. Therefore, developer activity is a great metric to look at in order to understand the long-term success of a crypto project.
Some of the top projects in the space have a ton of activity from developers. When looking at the top 500 market cap crypto projects, they are updated on average 357 times a year. The most active projects in terms of developer activity include Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, and Ethereum. Last year, Cardano alone had over 600 developers contributing to its network.
Data and graph provided by Stack.
Safemoon: Abandoned Crypto Projects
For crypto investors, diamond handing (aka HODLing) seems like it would be a terrible idea for projects that have little to no developer activity. Even if a project has enough hype at the beginning for it to skyrocket, over time the project will lose out to its competitors and it will be a waste to keep it in the portfolio.
So, what’s the ‘top 100’ project with little to no developer activity? Well, at press time it’s actually ranked 105 — its been in top 100 in the past — it but the answer is SafeMoon. According to the data produced by stacks, there has only been 5 developer contributions to SafeMoon in the past year. Furthermore, security firm Certik identified that SafeMoon has major decentralization and source code quality issues. Sorry SafeMoon Army, it might be time to let it go and dump those bags.
The top ten abandon crypto projects with little to no developer activity are actually worth over $3 billion.
Data and graph provided by Stack.
Safemoon: Why Open Source Is Important
Some may argue minimal/zero development activity isn’t a good metric to use for the evaluation of crypto projects because some projects are private and don’t open source their code. First off, that is not the case with SafeMoon and secondly, open source is a critical and fundamental feature of the blockchain.
Open source facilitates both transparency and security. It means that blockchains are very public, and they have a very transparent way of keeping records. For example, how do you think we knew that whales were dumping their money into $SHIB last week? The answer is open source.
The open-source aspect of blockchain technology also facilitates decentralization. In other words, providing open-source code and software allows for the transparency of any corruption if it’s occurring; and no one central entity can make decisions that impact everyone without it being seen.
To summarize, developer activity is a good metric to use when looking at the potential and long term success of a crypto project, SafeMoon has had minimal developer activity over the past year, and open source is an important and critical component of blockchain technology.
*The following was not financial advice.