Telstra Ventures and its data science team have concluded that Bitcoin is continuing to grow, albeit very slowly and steadily, powered mainly by price volatility. The verdict? Seems there are still a lot more exciting developments on the Web3 ecosystem side for the world’s longest-running cryptocurrency, plus the rest of the other runner-ups.
Bitcoin Interest, Still Ongoing in More Meanings than One
For the years 2018 to 2020, Bitcoin has been on a sort of value plateau, where its relative stability no longer continued to rise as it meteorically did over the past decade. As far as price bumps go, the highest should have been already recorded in 2019.
However, things took a sudden turn when 2020 arrived, with the occurrence we all know as the global pandemic. At the start of that fateful year, monthly active contributors surged, reaching double its growth sometime after July 2020. The value of Bitcoin equally soared, which saw a sharp rise during January 2021, peaking at the same double growth value just a few months after the next year.
This resulted in an overall average growth rate that saw the cryptocurrency never miss a bit by about 8 years. As for the step-by-step process, the contributor community continued increasing by a compound rate of 17.1% annually, which included the years 2018 and 2019.
The eventual crypto crash, unfortunately, brought Bitcoin back down to around $20,000. But to note, this is still at a considerably higher point than where it was before the end of 2020.
Meanwhile, at the Ethereum and Solana Networks…
During that same period, Ethereum’s developer interest eventually rose above 25% compound annual growth rate, with Solana at a quantum leap of 173%. This is quite interesting, since Solana as a reliable coin, only really started flying off the charts in 2017, as its first block gets created in 2020.
The raw value, of course, is much lower than either Etherium or Bitcoin. But before it eventually experienced its decline in November 2021, it reached a peak price of $200. Not too bad, considering the rest of the other stablecoins absolutely pale in comparison.
Ethereum had a much more eventful rollercoaster ride during the same time. It is, after all, the cryptocurrency that launched both crypto mining booms within the same five-year timespan. The aforementioned 24.9% growth rate, was actually at the tail end of the first mining boom. Of course, like the rest of the two, the hype eventually declined. After November 2021, price and number of contributors declined, although the merger to proof-of-stake did eventually become successful on September 2022 (definitely ending the second mining boom).
Telstra Ventures Methodology
The results of the study came from analyzing the activities of at least 1,000 active organizations that are contributing to any of the 30,000 projects related to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana within the Web3 ecosystem (as reported by the crypto capital venture Electrical Capital).
Each project should have a minimum of 100 stars in GitHub repositories, and need to be active between January to April 2022. Monthly active contributors were then listed based on repository level, and the number of unique contributions to a particular repository in month-long batches.
As for discerning acceptable GitHub activity growth rate, the researchers aggregated each single-month and whole-year percentage change in the total number of unique developments (stars, forks, commits, contributions), for each repository.
Other Things to Note
It is also interesting to point out that, while Telstra Ventures reports massive losses in crypto investments in 2022, development remains robust. The fact each entry has to be listed in compound growth rates alone is enough to conclude that the road is still very long ahead.
Most of the fastest-growing active projects, a value rated at seven out of ten, are solidly backed up by venture and corporate investors. This is to be expected, of course, since the immediate promise of results can be easily seen within these ecosystems.
Curiously, though, only 4 or 5 of the top ten most active projects included in the study are backed by venture and corporate investors. This suggests that a good chunk of good ideas and implementations gets thrown out the window simply due to a lack of investment. Or as Telstra Ventures describes “unfunded opportunities [that] remain”.
