The Top 10 Cryptocurrencies Aren't The Most Actively Developed

CoinCodeCap.com keeps track of the development activity of dozens of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is the 52nd most active cryptocurrency in terms of development, though it is the most active in terms of daily trading volume. It also has the largest market capitalization by far, and arguably more liquidity than several national currencies around the world. The top 10 cryptocurrencies do not necessarily line up with the most actively developed.

The top 10 most active development teams in cryptocurrencies tracked on the site are:

1. Cardano (ADA)

2. Augur (REP)

3. 0x (ZRX)

4. Ethereum (ETH)

5. Lisk (LSK)

6. Status (SNT)

7. TRON (TRX)

8. Komodo (KMD)

9. Skycoin (SKY)

10. Waves (WAVES)

Cardano has more than twice the commits of the second place Augur, at over 45,000. It should be noted that not every commit in a repository is necessarily “of substance.” Simply looking at the external metrics of a git repository does not necessarily indicate the level of work being done. A single commit can contain changes to every single file in a repository and it would still only count once. Likewise, a separate change to every file in a repository could be pushed and it would it would count as numerous commits.

Cardano’s six-month performance on the market is nothing like its performance in terms of code development.

While Cardano ranks at the top in terms of developmental frequency, it is currently #11 in terms of market capitalization. At time of writing, it had a price of just over $0.04 and a 24-hour trading volume of around $13 million.

Strong Development Efforts Don’t Always Equal Strong Market Results

Tron, which is 6 places below Cardano on the development activity list, is currently a top 10 cryptocurrency by marketcap. It had a 24-hour trading volume of $68 million, a total market cap about 25% higher, and a price-per-token about half of Cardano’s.

Ethereum, which is 4th on the list, is still second on the list of cryptos by market cap, after a significant rebounding push over the past couple of weeks. Perhaps it is notable that it tops both chats. Etheruem has multiple development repositories, but only its core client development is tracked by CoinCodeCap. In all, it seems they might be putting the most work and returning the most market-based results.

Several development teams like Monero and ZCash have their work spread across multiple repositories, which are not necessarily tracked by the site or immediately evident. In the case of Monero, it has two main development branches, one for its GUI wallet and one for its daemon implementation. Bitcoin, on the other hand, does the majority of its development in a single repository.

Here are the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and their current rankings by CoinCodeCap:

1. Bitcoin (52)

2. Ethereum (4)

3. Ripple (113)

4. Bitcoin Cash (143)

5. EOS (15)

6. Stellar (54)

7. Litecoin (195)

8. Tether (not ranked)

9. Bitcoin SV (not ranked)

10. Tron (7)

11. Cardano (1)

We add Cardano since Tether is not an actively developed cryptocurrency, but a smart contract which issues and destroys tokens based on investments. We tracked down the data for Bitcoin SV ourselves: according to a Curl request using Github’s API for statistics of repositories, there have been just two commits to the Bitcoin-SV repository in the weeks since November 15th, the day it forked away from Bitcoin Cash.

There were numerous commits prior to the actual day of the fork, but CoinCodeCap and this article are mainly talking about native work on the active development fork. To be fair, Bitcoin SV has only existed a very short time and much of their work seems to be in “testing” stages.

Statoshi.info creator Jameson Lopp recently commented via Twitter on the code development activity of various cryptocurrencies:

2018 commits & contributors, excluding merges from upstream forks:
Bitcoin Core: 3274 | 194
LND: 3050 | 139
geth: 1209 | 219
Grin: 1171 | 70
Zcash: 1026 | 53
Monero: 2084 | 111
Bitcoin ABC: 786 | 41
Dash: 766 | 18
Ripple: 304 | 25
Stellar: 626 | 29
Litecoin: 54 | 7

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 31, 2018

Featured image from Shutterstock. Chart from TradingView.