80,000+ Blockchain Projects, 8 Percent Survive

Evolution of Blockchain Technology: Insights
from the Github Platform ( Evolution) is an
analysis by Jesus Leal Trujillo, Steve
Fromhart, and Val Srinivas of Deloitte
Touche Tohmatsu Limited (Deloitte ). Their
findings reveal the wild growth of the
Bitcoin-generated blockchain industry and
the subsequent projects yielded. Many were
started, few remain.
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The First Empirical Attempt
to Understand the Evolution
of Blockchain
According to a recent study published this
week, blockchain-related projects average
nearly 9,000 a year since Spring of 2009.
Growth has taken off, however, as in 2016
over 26,000 projects were started through
the open-source platform Github.
“In analyzing blockchain repositories and
their content,” Evolution explains, “we
noticed that increasingly more organizations
appear to be getting involved. In 2010,
organizations developed less than 1 percent
of all projects. By 2017, their projects
accounted for 11 percent,” the study notes.
The Evolution study is “an effort to better
understand the development of blockchain
and its ecosystem,” Deloitte analysts write,
and “we have conducted an extensive data
analysis of blockchain projects in an open-
source environment. Our study appears to
be the first empirical attempt to understand
the evolution of blockchain using metadata
available on Github, a global software
collaboration platform,” they claim.
Findings include how financial “services
firms seem to be leading the way in
blockchain applicability; they currently have
the most commercial use cases of
blockchain in the marketplace.”
The two dominant projects all build upon
are Bitcoin and Ethereum, and both are
supported by foundations of one kind or
another. “In short, organization-led projects
are the backbone code for thousands of
other projects,” researchers highlight. “Out
of the 20 most central projects in the
blockchain space measured by popularity,
citation, and collaboration, 18 were created
and maintained by organizations”
Mortality Causes and Best
Cities
The beauty of open-source is that projects
tend to move as the spirits of their
developers and contributors. Such
inspiration comes from a variety of sources,
and it does appear difficult to maintain.
“Our analysis found that only 8 percent of
projects are active,” Evolution documents,
“which we define as being updated at least
once in the last six months.” Projects
maintained by organizations, however, have
an active rate of nearly double that.
“Note that about 90 percent of projects
developed on Github become idle, and the
average lifespan of a project is about one
year, with the highest mortality rate
occurring within the first six months,” the
UK firm details.
The study concludes success might boil
down to three ultimate factors: single-users
most likely are tinkerers, unserious
ultimately about their projects; instead of
one committer or leader for a project,
organizations that disperse workload
concentration tend to do better; and lastly,
projects that are copied (forked) survive
longer, though their copies often do not.
Evolution also found San Francisco, London,
and New York are the places to be
regarding blockchain projects. They term
San Francisco “diverse,” giving way to
“solutions for exchanges, wallets for
cryptocurrencies, interfaces for different
blockchains (for example, Ripple,
Hyperledger, and Ethereum), and payment
tools for cryptocurrencies.” London seems
all about Ethereum. New York appears “to
be specializing in projects that are geared
toward traditional financial services,” as
might be expected.