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You can tell a lot about the health of a network by its developer activity. More frequent updates are indicative of an ecosystem that’s expanding and being moved forward, while sporadic updates suggest that something is amiss. While not all commits are equal in value, when combined they paint a telling picture of which way a blockchain is heading.
In 2022, Polkadot outflanked every other non-Ethereum chain to record the most developer updates. While many of the chains that added EVM compatibility in 2021 withered and died as the going got tough this year, Pokadot’s relay chain, parachains, and sister network Kusama saw a flurry of dev activity, both from lead teams and from third party devs building their own applications. All of which augurs well for the health of Polkadot’s growing ecosystem in 2023 and beyond.
Not Everything Was Bad in Crypto This Year
While the year-end can’t come fast enough for most of 2022’s crypto players, the year has had its share of highlights. Mainstream media will understandably dwell on the stories that saw the industry’s protagonist dragged out of a Bahamanian courthouse in cuffs, but there were also more positive tales to tell.
One of these concerns the willingness of crypto builders to roll up their sleeves and keep shipping code with scant regard for vanity metrics such as TVL or ATH. These metrics can be gamed (such as through looping lending and borrowing on DeFi protocols), and are also highly correlated to the vicissitudes of the market cycle; when everything is mooning, it’s easy to claim billions of dollar of value than can swiftly evaporate once bearish conditions roll into town.
Metrics such as developer activity, on the other hand, are harder to fake. By September of this year, Polkadot was seeing an astonishing 500 Github commits a day, an all-time high for the blockchain network. At the same time as Polkadot was hitting this milestone, its cross-consensus interoperability standard XCM was sending 26,258 messages between its parachains.
Crypto data aggregator Token Terminal provides a clearer visualization of the spate of dev activity that’s been present on Polkadot all year. The number of active developers and code commits are both up in the last six months, with an average 140 developers and 60 code commits a day.
In 2022, Polkadot Further Decentralized
Increasing the number of active developers on a project can be seen as evidence of it decentralizing and becoming less reliant on any single entity. A more visible sign of this transition came with the October news that Gavin Wood was stepping down as CEO of Parity Technologies, the company that serves as Polkadot’s lead developer.
“The role of CEO has never been one which I have coveted (and this dates back long before Parity),” Wood explained. “Anyone who has worked with me knows where my heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer and architect. Like many such people, I work best asynchronously.”
With Wood free to focus on building rather than leading and more developers making code commits, there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic of Polkadot’s prospects for the coming year. The successful launch of its cross-chain messaging system and a major upgrade to its governance system and DOT staking platform were just some of the products shipped by Polkadot during an extremely busy 2022.
