As a researcher with a background in blockchain technology and crypto markets, I find the recent trend of layer-2 networks defying the bearish sentiment in the crypto market to be intriguing. According to data from Santiment, these projects have seen impressive developer activity despite the downturn in their native token prices.


As a researcher studying the cryptocurrency market, I’ve observed that April brought about a great deal of volatility and declines in crypto values. However, there was an unexpected silver lining: layer-2 networks experienced a surge in developer activity. This increase in development efforts indicates a strong faith among the community in these projects, despite recent setbacks in the value of their respective tokens.

Based on the GitHub activity of each project within the top ten layer-2 networks, I counted the unique events and calculated the average daily occurrence over the last 30 days to reach my selection. (Santiment’s recent tweet)

Based on Santiment’s findings, researchers gathered a project’s GitHub data through a verified method to only consider the teams’ advancements and enhancements in their analysis. A project’s level of GitHub activity serves as an indicator of its current development status. An increased number of developer contributions might decrease the likelihood that the project is a fraudulent exit scam.

Using Santiment’s analysis approach, it was found that Optimism, a scaling solution for Ethereum, recorded the most significant developer activity with 541.33 commits. This represents a noteworthy increase of over 146% compared to the second-ranked project. However, its associated token, OP, experienced a decline of more than 17% within the past month.

Despite the surge in developer activity on Starknet, the decentralized zero-knowledge rollup network without permission, resulting in a record of 220.23 transactions in April, the value of its native token, STRK, experienced a significant decrease of approximately 36% during the same period.

As an analyst, I’ve examined the development activity and asset performance of various Layer 2 scaling solutions during a recent timeframe. Arbitrum ranked third with a developer activity of 110.77, but unfortunately, its native token ARB experienced a 32% decrease within this period. Following closely were Cartesi in fourth place with a developer activity of 56.97, Immutable X in fifth place with 49.07, and Skale Network trailing behind in sixth position with 28.07. Notably, the native assets of these projects also saw significant declines, ranging from double-digit percentage drops.

Four projects towards the end of the list are MintLayer, a Bitcoin layer-2 sidechain, and Ethereum networks Polygon, MetisDAO, and Mantle. These projects have developer activity levels amounting to 23.53, 20.43, 7.87, and 5.33 respectively. Similar to other projects, their native tokens experienced significant declines in value during April.

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2024-05-05 01:04