[Messari Insight] Measuring recent Github activity for smart contract platforms

Developer engagement is an important metric to consider when evaluating crypto networks. Companies such as digital asset management firm Electric Capital rigorously study signs of developer activity within crypto communities. The firm's Managing Partner, Avichal Garg, supports this approach by explaining:

“Adoption and liquidity require wallets, [infrastructure], and apps/services. And engineers follow distribution [and] revenue, so winning platforms draw more devs. It is as important to understand developer ecosystems as users, miners, exchanges, and regulators.”

Electric Capital’s Developer Reports provide the most comprehensive look at burgeoning developer communities, but these reports are only released every six months. Developer engagement can be monitored more regularly by tracking Github activity, such as the number of Watchers, lines added, or commits accepted on a project’s main repository.

Inspired by Electric Capital's Developer Reports shown below are at the top 10 smart contract platforms by the number of commits made to each project’s main Github repo in the last 90 days.

Commits offer insight into the number of changes or updates accepted into the codebase. Code contribution measured via commits is an imperfect metric as it only shows the number of commits and not the quality of the new code. Moreover, it is possible to intentionally inflate commit activity to give a false impression of development strength. In the chart above, WaykiChain ($WICC) boasts more than double the number of commits in the last 90 days than the next smart contract platform, the well-funded and better-known EOS ($EOS) blockchain. The WaykiChain developer community could be in the midst of a months-long, highly coordinated coding sprint, but deciphering the legitimacy or quality of the accepted changes requires an in-depth look at the new code.

A more relevant Github metric is tracking the number of Watchers on a project’s main repository. Watchers are users who want to be notified of activity in a given repository. While it fails to account for users that ignore notifications or never contribute to the project, Watchers can offer superior insight into the overall level of developer interest relative to total commits.

Below are the top 10 smart contract platforms by the number of Watchers on a project’s main Github repo. Unsurprisingly, Github users tend to gravitate towards smart contract platforms with the highest Liquid Marketcaps.

Note that there are often many repositories associated with a given asset or project, but Github stats shown here are pulled from what our team considers the 'primary' repository for an asset. Occasionally it's not straightforward to determine which repository should be considered the primary one (or the project/asset is such that there just isn't a primary repo). In such cases, our team selects the repo that most closely defines the unique aspects of the project. This is usually a repo that defines the core node client for the asset, or a set of smart contracts.

On a separate note, Tezos transferred its main repository from Github to Gitlab last year, which explains the recent lack of activity within the Tezos Github repository. Despite the move, Tezos is still in the top ten among smart contract platforms by Watchers count. A Gitlab analysis also concludes that Tezos is among the most active developer communities with 246 commits accepted over the last 90 days.

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