As of July, there were about 2,000 monthly active contributors on the Ethereum network, which continues to have the most contributors overall.
Despite the volatility in the cryptocurrency market, a new study finds that since January 2018, the number of active contributors to the top projects of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana has grown by an average of 71.6 percent annually.
The information comes from a research released on Tuesday by technology investment company Telstra Ventures, which discovered that Solana has experienced the largest annual growth in monthly contributions since the start of 2018, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 173 percent.
Developers that contribute to GitHub, a repository for computer program code, push updates to the code.
Bitcoin came in third with a “slow and steady” annual gain of 17.1 percent, followed by Ethereum in second place with a 24.9 percent compound annual growth of monthly donors since 2018.
Telstra added that, of the three blockchains, Ethereum has the “biggest and strongest” developer community. The network had over 2,500 monthly active contributors in April, but that number dropped to over 2,000 contributors in July when the price of cryptocurrencies dropped.
The greater amount of effort required to get ready for the impending Merge, when the network switches to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, may account for the increasing number of active contributors.
In July, there were more over four times as many monthly active contributors on Ethereum as there were on Bitcoin and almost seven times as many as there were on Solana.
The report did point out that the contributor count dropped by 9% since last November, which coincided with a decline in the price of the cryptocurrency since its peak.
Investment possibilities in VC
The technological investment business also discovered that among the top 10 fastest-growing projects for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, almost 40% of those initiatives have not received venture capital funding, indicating that there are still plenty of investment prospects.
These initiatives include the Solana-based NFT standard MetaPlex, the Ethereum-based investing protocol OlympusDAO, the smart contract developer ApeWorx, and the maximum extracted value (MEV) researcher Flashbots.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) was the primary emphasis of 2022’s venture capital investing in cryptocurrency, but now Web3 apps are the main focus. The second quarter’s $14.67 billion in cryptocurrency investments was made up of 42 percent Web3 investments, increasing the total for the first half to $29.33 billion.
A venture capital organization with a technology focus, Telstra Ventures has 84 firms in its investment portfolio and $30 billion in assets under management. Blockdaemon and FTX exchange are blockchain businesses in which it has invested.
The information was gathered from 1,000 active groups that support more than 30,000 open source projects on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. The GitHub repositories of eligible projects have at least 100 stars, and they were active between January and April 2022.
