The story began with the company’s wanting to expand the business in 2021: they were then considering developing a new software product using Web3 and blockchain techniques. Regarding this, CoinMarketCap was chosen because it’s one of the most used price-tracking website for crypto assets. The rank of a digital currency on CoinMarketCap is evaluated by its market capitalization. Targeted at cryptocurrencies ranked top 300 on CoinmarketCap on the day of August 24 2021, I collected and compiled a variety of public data on developers of these cryptocurrency projects, and produced this analysis report. Honestly speaking, this can hardly be regarded as an “analysis report” as the goal was not forming a conclusion. It’s more a simple collection of data, the purpose of which was forming a reference for further assessment. To be specific, the purpose was to enable senior engineers to pick up blockchain projects they thought good to refer to, and then look into and analyze the source code, as well as the developer-relevant statistics. As a result, we the R&D team were able to provide to the company insights from the perspective of tech.

Notes

All data collected were the publicly available information on the web.
Kindly don’t view what you’ll see below as an “analytical report”. There’s not much analysis provided, and no conclusion was made.
Now this data collection has lost its original property, that is, being a reference, as all statistics are obsolete. On the other hand, as I’m not a data engineer, thus I can’t guarantee all the data being properly extracted and processed. So…just take it for fun. Let’s take a glance into the veil of cryptocurrencies by looking at their developers.

What Data I Collected

My data collecting process was conducted in two steps:

Step 1. Find whether the source code link was available on CoinMarketCap. If available, fetch the code repository link of that cryptocurrency

Source Code Location on CMC

Step 2. Use the links to access code repositories. If the repository is pubic, extract the developer-related information

Below are what I collected from the public repositories (As of August 25, 2021)

Project name/Repository name
Number of repositories (if available)
Top coding language
Last updated time
License

Location of target data on page layout type A

Location of target data on page layout type B

What I found

Source Code Link Availability

In short, 216 of top 300 cryptocurrencies listed their code repository on CoinMarketCap. Among the rest 84 that chose to not list the link to their souce code, well-known ones include Binance Coin, Tether, Uniswap and Filecoin.

Availability	Count
Link Listed	216
No Link	84

Code Repository Accessibility

By accessing those 216 code repositories, 211 were found publicly accessible to everyone on the internet.

Accessibility Type	Count
Public	211
Private	2
404/empty	3

Code Repository Hosting Place

Github’s popularity was unparalleled. 201 of 216 repositories were hosted on Github.

Repository Type	Count
GitHub	201
Gitlab	3
Etherscan	3
Bitbucket	2
Other	2

Developers Activity

Last updated time

This data is available in GitHub, Gitlab and Bitbucket repositories. The statistics collected under this category indicated how long has been from the time of extracting the info from the page since the last commit had been made to the repository. Normally, active update records mean a healthy growth of the project. Of 211 public code repositories, on the day of August 25 2021, 143 (that is, more than two thirds) had their last commit submitted no more than one week ago.

Last commit submitted	Count
seconds ago	3
minutes ago	40
hours ago	52
days ago	48

As a contrast, a total of 15 repositories were found their last update had been submitted more than 6 months ago. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean the development was halted, and these cryptocurrencies were deprecated by their developers (or in crypto words, became “dead coins”). It’s a red sign or alarm signal, though.

Last commit submitted	Count
more than 6 months ago	2
more than 1 year ago	3
more than 2 years ago	6
more than 3 years ago	3
more than 4 years ago	1

Top Coding Language (applicable to GitHub repositories only)

This “Top Language” info was found available in 201 repository, resulting in extraction of 201 valid samples. Being the top language of 68 repositories, JavaScript was the most-utilized language even in the cryptocurrency and blockchain development, followed by TypeScript (that is, JavaScript with syntax for types) and C++.

License (applicable to GitHub repositories only)

While it’s ok for developers to not license their repositories, I collected 118 valid samples. Applied by 60 repositories, MIT License was the most utilized license, followed by Apache-2.0 and GPL-3.0.

Appendix

Software Used

web data extracting: Octoparse (plus a handful of manual copy & paste)
data processing : Microsoft Excel
charts making: Microsoft Excel

A Developer Analysis On CoinMarketCap Top 300 Cryptocurrencies (2021)

目录