Despite the recent Crypto bloodbath, active contributors kept constantly betting on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana's top projects. Typically, contributors are developers responsible for updating the code on GitHub, a code repository for computer programs.
According to the latest Telstra Ventures investment firm report, active contributors across these projects have increased by an average of 71.6% per year since January 2018.
This Data was derived from 1,000 active organizations that contributed over 30,000 open source projects on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Eligible projects for study have at least 100 stars in GitHub repositories and were in the active phase between January and April 2022.
Solana gathered the most significant annual increase in monthly-active contributors, jumping at a compound annual growth rate of 173% since January 1, 2018.
Ethereum was second on the list with a 24.9% compound annual growth surge of monthly contributors since 2018, and Bitcoin was third with a "slow and steady" 17.1% yearly increase.
The investment firm also noted that Ethereum hosts the "largest and strongest" developer community out of the three blockchains. The ETH network owned nearly 2,500 monthly active contributors in April, which tumbled to over 2,000 in July, coinciding with a fall in the crypto price.
The initial higher number of active contributors could be due to the upcoming Merge in which the network transitions into Proof-of-Stake consensus. Reportedly, the number of monthly active contributors on the ETH Blockchain in July was more than 4X higher than Bitcoin's 400 contributors and nearly 7X higher than Solana's 350 contributors.
Since last November, the contributor count saw a decline of 9%, coinciding with a fall in the cryptocurrency's price since its ATH.
The technology investment firm also determined that among the top ten fastest growing projects across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, around 40% of projects didn't receive any venture capital backing, which means that investment opportunities remain abundant.
These projects include Ethereum-based investment protocol OlympusDAO, Solana-based NFT standard MetaPlex, smart contract developer ApeWorx, and maximum extracted value (MEV) researcher Flashbots.
The opportunities remain abundant because Venture capital funding in the crypto space is now more focused on Web3 applications. In addition, Web3 investments accounted for 42% of the $14.67 billion in crypto projects in Q2, bringing the first half total to $29.33 billion.