Hassan Maishera
Developer activity on Polkadot is weathering the bear market surprisingly well. The multichain blockchain platform had more than 500 GitHub commits per day during September 2022, putting it second only to Ethereum by the metric.
At the end of last month, Polkadot core developers released a refined scaling roadmap. A series of network optimizations aim to enable the blockchain platform to process more than one million transactions per second and likely accounts for the surge in GitHub activity.
Polkadot dev activity hits back-to-back all-time highs
Believe it or not, Polkadot has the second most active developer community across the entire blockchain and crypto industry. Following back-to-back all-time highs, the multichain blockchain platform comes second only to Ethereum — the most established smart contract-enabled network — in terms of activity on relevant GitHub repositories.
Figures from crypto intelligence provider Artemis show that Polkadot and its sub-ecosystems' GitHub repositories received just over 9,000 commits during the week of Oct. 2. Comparatively, Ethereum received around 9,300 commits over the same period.
Polkadot comes second to Ethereum in terms of weekly active developers, too. Ethereum reportedly has 1,900 and Polkadot has more than 880.
Despite the lull in crypto prices during 2022, Polkadot's developer activity shows its community is committed to building. Further spurring activity, however, appears to be the exciting scaling roadmap revealed at the end of September.
According to Rob Habermeier, a Polkadot co-founder, forthcoming updates will cut parachain block time and increase block space, enabling the network to process as many as one million transactions per second. To put that in perspective, Visa can reportedly hit more than 65,000 TPS. Meanwhile, Solana claims a theoretical limit of 710,000 — when the network is not experiencing downtime, that is.
Polkadot developers aim to achieve said throughput with a series of consensus protocol optimizations called Asynchronous Backing. Essentially, the upgrade gives block collators longer to include more transactions in each block, leading to higher throughput.
Polkadot Dev Activity Thriving as Scaling Roadmap Eyes 1 Million TPS
Polkadot's developer statistics are even more impressive when considered alongside those from other, possibly more mainstream networks. Yet, given the ecosystem's ambitious but potentially revolutionary scaling roadmap, surging dev activity is to be expected.
Behind Polkadot are Cosmos and its associated ecosystems, which had 2,329 commits from 497 active developers during the week of Oct. 2 — down considerably from earlier in September when almost 670 devs made more than 4,400 commits. Cosmos has significant upgrade plans of its own following the revamped Cosmos Hub whitepaper release in late September.
Falling just outside the top three are Solana and Bitcoin, which still have more than 2,200 commits apiece for the week of Oct. 2. However, Solana trumps the foundational blockchain in weekly active developers with 401 versus 322. NEAR protocol is ironically lagging behind with just 1,281 commits from 146 developers.
While development continues across each of these multibillion-dollar blockchains, it remains down considerably versus 2021 highs. Across all blockchain ecosystems, Artemis reports 40,800 weekly commits for the week of Oct. 2. Comparatively, commits hit an all-time high of 161,700 during the bull market.
