Cardano most actively developed cryptocurrency in 2018, bitcoin not even in top 50

Cardano | Loss: $17.8 billion | Currently the 11th largest cryptocurrency suffered the fifth biggest loss among major cryptocurrencies over the year. The cryptocurrency was launched last year and soon zoomed to a valuation of $19 billion at the start of 2018. It further climbed to be worth $29 billion in late January. However, at the end of year, at $1 billion its valuation is a fraction of that at its prime.

Being the most actively traded or most valued cryptocurrency does not mean it will be the most actively developed one as well. Bitcoin, the world’s most traded cryptocurrency, is a distant 52^nd most actively developed cryptocurrency in the last 12 months, according to coincodecap.com, which maintains a log.

Cardano, which is not even among top 10 most valued currencies, is by far the most actively developed one. In the last 12 months, it has received about 46,000 commits in its code repositories. Augur, ranked 48^th in the most valued currencies list, has been the second most actively developed currency in the last 12 months with about 22,000 commits.

Ox, ethereum and lisk are the next most developed cryptocurrencies, in the same order.

What is a commit?

Commits are like a record of all the changes/updates that have been made to a project. In the words of the developer of CoinCodeCap:

“A commit, or “revision”, is an individual change to a file (or set of files). It’s like when you save a file, except with Git, every time you save it creates a unique ID (aka the “SHA” or “hash”) that allows you to keep a record of what changes were made when and by who. Commits usually contain a commit message which is a brief description of what changes were made.”

Flashback 2018: 10 cryptocurrencies that lost the most in 2018

Why are commits important?

Commits reflect how much work is being done on a project. Much like the share price of common stock is generally factored on the company’s current performance, a value of a coin should ideally be based on the work behind the scenes.

Generally, the technological project represented by a coin or currency is not talked about whenever cryptocurrencies are discussed. But, when someone buys a coin or a cryptocurrency, he or she is actually investing in the project that the coin or currency represents. Commits show how much the developers are investing their labour on the project.

Tech Development —> Value creation — > Mass adoption —> Money

"Above is normal growth path for any industry but in terms of crypto this is flowing backwards and this is problematic," said Gaurav Agrawal of CoinMonk in his Medium article.

However, in a long term, the general order of growth can be spotted. Ethereum and Bitcoin, both of which are excellent technological products, have seen their respective currencies’ value rise leaps and bounds since their inception. This is even if we gauge them on their current depleted price. Same is true for many other currencies.