Hackathon Developer Activity

Key Insights

• Hackathons can be a low-noise indicator of developer activity within a sector.
• Both DeFi and NFTs accounted for a majority of hackathon submissions before their respective bull runs.
• Social projects are now the majority (36%) of ETHGlobal hackathon submissions and awards.
• Of the finalists in the recent ETHBogota hackathon, projects with social features outnumbered all other sectors.

Applications and bull markets don’t appear out of thin air. They are the product of developers toiling away on new projects. In this sense, developer activity is a leading indicator of which application sectors and ecosystems are likely to receive future market attention.

Tracking developer activity, however, is far easier said than done. Github commits and social metrics are often easily manipulated and noisy as a result. Hackathons, on the other hand, incorporate a human judgment element, which leads to a higher signal perspective on developer activity.