Chainstack, a leading managed blockchain services provider, has published the first-ever report on the state and evolution of the global developer activity of enterprise blockchains tracing the activity over the last five years. Captured over the span of several months, the Enterprise Blockchain Protocols Evolution Index 2020 is the first of its kind to provide detailed qualitative and quantitative insights into the trends and changes in the developer community and activity of the 6 most active publicly available enterprise protocols being built today – Corda, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, MultiChain, and Quorum.
Addressing the lack of protocol developer-focused data in existing enterprise blockchain surveys, this report empowers enterprises, governments, and developers to make more informed decisions when embarking on blockchain projects by providing an additional layer of insight into the technological maturity of each protocol.
Key findings include:
- The unique number of developers contributing to enterprise blockchain deployment grew more than 12 fold from Q3 2016 to Q4 2019.
- On average in 2018 and 2019, Corda and Hyperledger Fabric represented over 50% of all developer activities.
- Hyperledger Fabric and R3’s Corda as leading in terms of developer community size, accounting for over 86% of total unique developers that have pushed code.
- Quorum, the enterprise Ethereum fork by JPMorgan, exhibited fast growth and doubled its number of active developers in 2019.
The Enterprise Blockchain Protocols Evolution Index 2020 uses a proven and accurate methodology to investigate all developer activities of open-sourced, general-purpose blockchain protocols hosted on GitHub by tracing all events, accounting for over 28,500 unique contributing developers. As underlying foundational infrastructure, these platforms will host the next generation of applications that enterprises across industries will adopt to leverage decentralization’s key benefits.
A 2019 Gartner report cited the highly fragmented blockchain platform market as a major source of confusion for IT decision-makers when making technology choices in blockchain projects, hindering the technology’s adoption. Analyzing platform developer engagement provides direct signals not only the overall progress of the technology’s uptake, but also the rate at which different platforms are evolving amidst rapid industry changes.
Developer activity is a reflection of the number of resources dedicated to growing and evolving the codebase and the community developing each of these protocols. As an indication of a protocols’ performance and longevity, enterprises can use development data to evaluate the stability and maturity of these platforms for enterprise implementations.
“This is the first time that a time series analysis has been applied to comparing top protocols with any meaningful results – showing where the industry is heading now.”
– Laurent Dedenis, CEO at Chainstack
Chainstack consistently monitors activity across enterprise blockchain protocols and will continue to update this index annually to track and release significant industry changes.
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