According to a new report, active contributors to the top Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana projects have grown by an average of 71.6% annually since January 2018, despite the turmoil in the crypto market.
This Find A report from tech investment firm Telstra Ventures, sent to Cointelegraph on Aug. 2, found that Solana had the most significant annual increase in monthly active contributors, growing at a compound annual rate of 173% since Jan. 1, 2018 rate growth.
Contributors are developers who push code updates on GitHub, a code repository for computer programs.
Since 2018, Ethereum has the second-highest compound annual growth rate of 24.9% monthly contributors, and Bitcoin is third with a “slow and steady” 17.1% annual growth rate.
Telstra also noted that it found that Ethereum has the “largest and strongest” developer community of the three blockchains. The network had nearly 2,500 monthly active contributors in April, which fell to over 2,000 in July, coinciding with the decline in cryptocurrency prices.
More active contributors may be due to more outputs needed to prepare for an upcoming merge where the network transitions to proof-of-work consensus.
The number of monthly active contributors on Ethereum in July was more than four times that of Bitcoin’s 400 contributors and nearly seven times that of Solana’s 350 contributors.
However, the report noted that the number of contributors has fallen by 9 percent since November, which is in line with the decline in cryptocurrency prices since their peak.
Venture Capital Opportunities
The tech investment firm also found that around 40% of the top 10 fastest-growing projects in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana do not have any venture capital backing, meaning investment opportunities remain plentiful.
These projects include Ethereum-based investment protocol OlympusDAO, smart contract developer ApeWorx, Maximum Extracted Value (MEV) researcher Flashbots, and Solana-based NFT standard MetaPlex.
related: Investors turn to less risky crypto yields — Block Earner GM
Throughout 2022, venture capital funding in the crypto space has shifted its 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 the second quarter, bringing the first half total to $29.33 billion.
Telstra Ventures is a technology-focused venture capital firm with 84 companies in its portfolio and $30 billion in assets under management. It has invested in blockchain company Blockdaemon and FTX exchange.
Data comes from 1,000 active organizations contributing to over 30,000 open source projects on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Eligible research projects have at least 100 stars in the GitHub repository and are active between January 2022 and April 2022.
