Cardano and Ethereum battle for most active DApp developers ahead of upgrade

• Cardano has surpassed Ethereum in terms of the number of GitHub commits per month.
• Ethereum leads when it comes to the network with the most active developers.

The Cardano (ADA) – Ethereum (ETH) competition continues to stiffen over time. This is reflected in a Blockchain Development Trends Report by Outlier Ventures crypto investment group. Outlier analyzed the top 50 blockchains in terms of native asset market cap between July 2020 and June 2021.

Notably, Cardano has surpassed Ethereum in terms of the number of GitHub commits per month. GitHub commits are an estimated indicator of a blockchain community’s underlying health. Results show that Cardano led with 701 GitHub code repositories, 24 percent higher than its commits from the previous year. Ethereum came in second with 447 and IOTA third with 394. Filecoin and NFT-centric blockchain Flow came in fourth and fifth with 368 and 305 respectively.

Moreover, Ethereum and Cardano ranked first and second in terms of monthly active developers, with 168 and 165 respectively. Other protocols exhibited triple-digit-percentage growth year-over-year. They include Avalanche, Ocean, Terra, and Cosmos.

Cardano and developer activity

Over time, these figures have been given due consideration as they have been strong indicators of developments. For instance, in Q2 2020, Outlier Ventures produced a report showing a “substantial rise in developer activity” on Polkadot and Cosmos. A few months down the line and Polkadot’s DOT was ranking among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap. Meanwhile, Cosmos’s price rose 438 percent last year.

Still, the same report pointed out that EOS, Bitcoin Cash, and TRON were facing massive dips in developer activity. True to this, the three blockchains have in the past year fallen out of public favor. Other platforms with higher emphasis on DeFi applications (DApps) and NFTs have been shining brighter. Both EOS and TRON have DApps but have not been gaining much traction, according to data from DeFi Llama. Nonetheless, coins from the three networks have experienced noteworthy gains in the past year.

Last year, DApps had explosive growth following increased crypto community discourse on their “third-party-less” financial services. Soon thereafter came the NFT rush. Initially, both DeFi and NFTs were exclusively available on Ethereum due to their smart contracts capabilities. Other networks such as Solana, and soon, Cardano have begun picking up the trend. Cardano is looking forward to launching smart contracts on its network this weekend.

Bumpy road

The road for Cardano, however, has been filled with stumbling blocks. In some sort of “counteractive” style, Ethereum developers, among others, criticized Cardano’s smart contracts this week after DApp issues. Cardano’s first DApp, a decentralized exchange known as Minswap, shut down its testnet following a “concurrency” issue.

Essentially, a single block represents a single transaction. This is a big setback for transaction-heavy DeFi applications which rely on blockchain-based smart contracts for every function. Nonetheless, Cardano has defended its smart contract design saying it is a feature, not a bug. Its design improves security and reduces the probability of unexpected fees. More so, concurrency issues like the aforementioned are avoidable.