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Outlier Ventures Trends Report: Where Have the Developers of 'Ethereum Killers' EOS, TRON GONE?

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For the project side, continuous development investment and results are an important foundation to ensure that the project can go further.

As an important indicator of whether a team is "doing something," although GitHub Commits and developer activity levels do not fully explain the status of a blockchain project, they do provide some insight into the project's sustainability and potential.

For the project side, continuous development investment and results are an important foundation to ensure that the project can go further. Outlier Ventures has released a report titled "Blockchain Development Trends 2021," which analyzes the code development activity of major blockchain projects, DEFI and NFT projects over the past 12 months and the trends for 2021.

在搜索了 186 个 GitHub 项目，索引 6163 个代码库，并分析超过 100 万次提交后，报告撰写者发现：在过去 12 个月中，以太坊仍然是开发最活跃的区块链协议，其次是 Cardano 和比特币；而 Polkadot、Cosmos 和 Avalanche 等项目在核心开发和贡献者方面持续增长。值得注意的是，Filecoin 也直接跃升为了开发最活跃项目的前五个项目之一。

Items with the top five COMMITs for blockchain projects

Top 5 projects by core developers of blockchain projects

The number of developers at Avalanche, Terra, and Flow has increased dramatically over the past year, with Avalanche's weekly and monthly active developers increasing fourfold over the past year to around 50% of those at Cosmos and Polkadot.

In addition, the number of developers on projects including Solana(36%), Monero(35%), Zilliqa(33%), Tezos(30%) and Near Protocol(22%) also increased; Near Protocol reached a strong peak at the end of April 2020, around the time the mainnet went online.

In addition, the core development indicators of projects such as Tron, EOS, Komodo and Qtum, which were once known as Ethereum killers, as well as Nano, Handshake and WAX, have all dropped more than 50%. However, it is important to note that WAX and the shift to the NFT market may explain the decrease in development activity on this project.

On the other hand, the Etherium-based DEFI protocol, which is mostly open source, has seen a significant increase in core developer and contribution activities, with Maker, Gnosis and Syntix being the most active, and Aave and Bancor also showing significant growth. Sushiswap and Yearn Finance were both launched in 2020 and soon outperformed the other DEFI protocols.

In addition to The five most active projects, other projects that continued to grow throughout The year were The Graph, Dash, Zilliqa, Tezos, Decred, Solana, Oasis, and Fetch.ai. In the DEFI space, the most notable growth over the past year has been AVE (763%), Bancor(264%), Set Protocol(161%), and MSTable (153%).

The extent to which code has been updated also reveals the transition between the old and the new. In terms of data, code submissions for BZX, Maker, Opyn, Instadapp, Alpha Homora, DyDx, Compound, Augur, RenVM, and McDex are down by more than 33% in 2020.

Since many NFT projects that focus on collectibles, games, crypto art, and virtual worlds are mostly developed in a closed-source way, it is difficult to tell from the data which projects are actively coding.

Decentraland is an obvious exception. As you can see from the figure below, it has a higher level of development activity than its peers, even the more popular DeFi Uniswap and Compound projects. In the enterprise blockchain space, Hyperledger has more active development activity than Corda, although the latter has better growth numbers if compared to Corda.