Contributors who have raised Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana since 2018: Report
Despite turbulence in the crypto market, active contributors across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana’s top projects have increased by an average of 71.6% per year since January 2018, according to a new report.
The findings come from an Aug. 2 report sent to Cointelegraph by tech investment firm Telstra Ventures, which found Solana had the most significant annual increase in monthly active contributors, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 173% since Jan. 1, 2018.
Contributors are developers who push updates to code on GitHub, a code repository for computer programs.
Ethereum was second with a 24.9% compound annual growth in monthly contributors since 2018, and Bitcoin was third with a “slow and steady” 17.1% annual increase.
Telstra also noted that it found Ethereum to have the “largest and strongest” developer community of the three blockchains. The network had nearly 2,500 monthly active contributors in April, which dropped to over 2,000 contributors in July, along with a drop in the crypto price.
The higher number of active contributors may be due to the larger portion of production needed to prepare for the upcoming merger where the network moves to Proof-of-Work consensus.
The amount of monthly active contributors on Ethereum in July was more than four times higher than Bitcoin’s 400 contributors and almost seven times higher than Solana’s 350 contributors.
However, the report noted that the number of contributors fell by 9% since last November, coinciding with a fall in the cryptocurrency’s price since its peak.
VC investment opportunities
The technology investment firm also found that among the ten fastest-growing projects across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, around 40% of projects have had no venture capital backing, meaning investment opportunities are still plentiful.
These projects include Ethereum-based investment protocol OlympusDAO, smart contract developer ApeWorx, MEV researcher Flashbots, and Solana-based NFT standard MetaPlex.
Related: Investors Shifting Towards Lower Risk Crypto Interest — Block Earner GM
Crypto venture capital funding through 2022 has shifted focus from decentralized finance (DeFi) to Web3 applications, according to research from Cointelegraph in July. Web3 investments accounted for 42% of the $14.67 billion invested in crypto projects in Q2, bringing the total for the first half of the year to $29.33 billion.
Telstra Ventures is a technology-focused venture capital firm with 84 companies in its investment portfolio and $30 billion in assets under management. It has invested in blockchain companies Blockdaemon and FTX exchange.
Data was drawn from 1,000 active organizations contributing to more than 30,000 open source projects on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. Eligible projects for study have at least 100 stars in GitHub repositories and were active between January and April 2022.
