Engineers and developers are gradually switching from tier 1 blockchains that rival Ethereum to DeFi protocols.
According to the latest blockchain industry trend report from venture capital firm Outlier Ventures, developers are shifting their focus from Ethereum rivals to DeFi apps. Ethereum has remained the most actively developed blockchain protocol over the past year, followed by Cardano and Bitcoin. The fourth place after the launch of the main network in October 2020 was taken by the Filecoin decentralized data warehouse project.
While some newer platforms, such as Polkadot, Cosmos and Avalanche, are seeing an increase in developer activity, many of Ethereum’s competitors are seeing a decline in protocol development.
Ethereum Killers – Tron, EOS, Komodo and Qtum have all experienced a decline in developer activity in the past year, ”the researchers note.
At the same time, Ethereum-based DeFi protocols, which showed strong growth in 2020, began to attract more attention from developers, with Aave and Balancer apps showing the largest growth in such activity. In addition, the most actively developed DeFi projects are Maker, Gnosis, Synthetix, SushiSwap, and Yearn Finance.
“SushiSwap and Yearn Finance, launched in 2020, quickly expanded beyond the development effort and scope of most other DeFi protocols.”
DeFi was not the only sector of growth in developer activity. Projects related to virtual worlds, collectibles and games (usually using non-reproducible tokens – NFTs) have also attracted blockchain developers. According to the report, the activity of the developers of the virtual reality platform on the Decentraland blockchain was similar to the level of some large blockchains, for example, Stellar and Algorand, and higher than that of some of the popular DeFi protocols – Uniswap and Compound.
When collecting data for the report, the researchers analyzed project Github repositories, where developers send code updates, improvements and suggestions. Ethereum is still the most actively developed protocol: its developers are 14% more active than Cardano, and almost double Bitcoin in terms of the number of proposals for code changes.
This can largely be attributed to the development of Ethereum 2.0 – the Beacon Chain was launched on December 1st. Ethereum 2.0 capabilities will expand as the next phases roll out.
