Devs ditching old ‘Ethereum killers’ for DeFi, NFTs and newer chains: Report

Published at: Feb. 4, 2021

Software engineers and developers are slowly switching their attention from layer-one blockchains once dubbed ‘Ethereum killers’ to the ever-increasing number of new decentralized finance protocols.

A February Blockchain Development Trends report by venture capital firm Outlier Ventures suggests that developers are switching their focus away from Ethereum rivals.

The findings confirm that over the past twelve months, Ethereum remains the most actively developed blockchain protocol, followed by Cardano and Bitcoin. Jumping into the fourth spot in the year of its public launch, is decentralized file storage project Filecoin.

The report noted that while some new platforms such as Polkadot, Cosmos, and Avalanche are seeing an increase in developer activity, many of the traditional Ethereum competitors are seeing a decline in core development.

“Ethereum killers Tron, EOS, Komodo, and Qtum are seeing a decrease in core development metrics.”

The report stated that Ethereum-based DeFi platforms took the space by storm in 2020 and they have seen an increase in developer activity with Aave and Balancer showing the most growth.

In addition to these two, the most active projects were Maker, Gnosis, and Synthetix while two other recently launched DeFi protocols also surged in terms of developer activity.

“SushiSwap and Yearn Finance, both launched in 2020, quickly grew toward and beyond the development activity and size of most other DeFi protocols.”

During the height of the DeFi boom in mid-2020, Santiment research revealed that the top DeFi platforms in terms of development activity were Maker, Synthetix, Band Protocol, and Augur.

DeFi was not the only growth sector as activity in the NFT (non-fungible token) and Metaverse projects such as virtual worlds, collectibles, gaming, and crypto art also saw a market-wide increase in interest.

The report noted that Decentraland had development activity on similar levels to some major blockchain technologies like Stellar and Algorand, and higher than those of some of the most popular DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Compound.

To generate the data the researchers analyzed Github repositories and commits which is where developers submit code updates, improvements, and proposals.

Ethereum still remains the king overall though, with 14% more developer activity than its closest rival, Cardano, and almost double that of Bitcoin in terms of commits.

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