Cardano is launching smart contracts this weekend as part of its Alonzo network upgrade.

CARDANO. IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK

In brief

• Ethereum and Cardano ranked first and second for most active monthly developers.
• Cardano beat Ethereum on the number of Github commits per month.

The developers behind Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain that aims to compete with Ethereum as a playground for decentralized applications and NFTs, is getting ready for its much anticipated Alonzo update this weekend.

They’ve been hard at work, according to numbers from crypto investment group Outlier Ventures.

Outlier’s most recent Blockchain Development Trends report, which analyzed the top 50 blockchains by their native assets’ market caps from July 2020 through June 2021, found that Cardano had the most commits per month on GitHub code repositories, with 701. That was 24% higher than its commits from the previous year. Ethereum came in second with 447, IOTA ranked third with 394, Filecoin fourth with 368, and NFT-centric blockchain Flow rounded out the top five 305.

Ethereum and Cardano ranked first and second in terms of monthly active developers, with 168 and 165 per month, respectively. Additionally, other protocols—including Avalanche, Ocean, Terra, and Cosmos came on strong in the last year with triple-digit-percentage growth over the previous year.

Github commits is a proxy indicator of a blockchain community’s underlying health, though an imperfect one. Nonetheless, glancing at last year’s report is instructive in determining how seriously to take these numbers.

Outlier Ventures’ Q2 2020 report found a “substantial rise in developer activity” for Polkadot and Cosmos. A few months later, Polkadot’s DOT came “from nowhere” to land in the top 10 by market capitalization. Cosmos’ price, meanwhile, has risen 438% in the last year, according to data from CoinGecko.