Data shows Polkadot (DOT) is still the number one cryptocurrency in the market regarding the project’s development activity.
Polkadot Continues To Top The Development Activity Chart
According to data from the on-chain analytics firm Santiment, besides Polkadot, the assets in the top three for this indicator are Kusama (KSM) and Cardano (ADA).
The “development activity” measures the work the cryptocurrency project’s developers have done on the project’s public GitHub repositories during the last 30 days.
In this indicator, the developers’ work is gauged not using the total number of commits on the project (as some other versions of this metric may do) but rather in terms of “events.”
An event refers to an action on the GitHub repository, like pushing a commit, forking the repository, creating an issue, etc. The benefit of this approach is that the developers’ actual work is more accurately weighed. To see how to consider the example of forking.
As the action of forking creates a duplicate copy of the repository, all commits made on the original naturally carry over to the fork. However, if the original repository wasn’t made by the developer forking it, the old commits naturally differ from the work of this new developer.
But if the development activity is measured using commits alone, these commits included in the copy will also be counted under the name of this developer, thus providing a false picture. In Santiment’s metric version, the forking action is counted as one event only, so this doesn’t become an issue.
Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the development activity for the top 20 cryptocurrencies (based on this metric) over the last few years:
DOT seems to be on the top of this list | Source: Santiment on Twitter
As shown in the above graph, Polkadot and Kusama have a decent gap over the other cryptocurrencies, as the development activity’s value is 4,117 for both coins.
Cardano, the third most developed asset right now, has seen some decline in this metric during recent weeks, which has taken it a bit close to Cosmos (ATOM) in fourth place.
Over the last few years, both DOT and KSM have registered some decent growth in their development activity, but the indicator’s value has remained more or less the same for ADA. Nonetheless, the sideways movement has been around already high values.
The significance of the development activity is that it can tell us whether the developers are committed to a project. While it’s not the end-all metric, a high development activity can still be a positive sign that the coin is likely not just an exit scam.
The chart shows that Polkadot has been the most developed cryptocurrency in the market for many months now, showing how committed the developers have been toward the project.
An interesting trend emerged when Santiment compared the price returns of the top 10 assets (based on the development activity) to the next 10 (of the top 20). The first batch (those with more development activity) saw losses of 3% on average during the last six months, while the other group saw losses of 14%.
“Generally speaking, the further down you go on the development activity list, the worse average performances you’ll see,” explains the firm. “Just remember there will be tons of exceptions, so take this with a grain of salt.”
DOT Price
At the time of writing, Polkadot is trading around $5.9, down 6% in the last week.
Polkadot seems to have significantly declined recently | Source: DOTUSD on TradingView