Ethereum Leads in Active Developers, Bitcoin's Developer Count Healthy, Litecoin and Dogecoin "Being Abandoned"

Ethereum is strongly leading in the total number of active developers working on both its core protocol and in total development; Bitcoin boasts a strong developer ecosystem 10 years after launch, while Litecoin and Dogecoin are "Being abandoned," according to an analysis by one crypto venture capital firm.

Based on the report, Ethereum has the largest number of monthly active developers working on both its core protocol and for all projects under its umbrella when compared to all top 200 projects by market capitalization.

Between Jan. 31st, 2018 to 2019, Ethereum had an average of 99 active developers per month for its core protocol and 216 for all repositories.

Litecoin fell from 40 monthly active developers to 3 developers within the year.

Dogecoin has had 0 active developers for consecutive months, an indicator that the open-source project is becoming obsolete.

Other projects which had fewer than 5 active monthly developers include Ethereum Classic, NEM, NEO, Bitcoin Gold, and Bitcoin Diamond.

Note, a small number of developers does not necessarily mean that the amount of development performed by those developers is insubstantial.

According to the report, over the last two years, the number of developers working on public cryptocurrencies has more than doubled, going from 1,800 to 4,000 active monthly developers.

While market capitalization fell approximately 80 percent from January 2018 to 2019, monthly active developers fell a modest 4 percent over that same time.

The number of monthly active developers provides another useful data point for assessing which cryptocurrency projects are making meaningful technical progress.