The popular smart contract platform Cardano ($ADA) has maintained its top stop in cryptocurrency development activity, outperforming other major digital assets including Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH).
That’s according to data from on-chain analytics firm Santiment, which noted that the “blockchain of blockchains” Polkadot ($DOT) and its public pre-production environment Kusama ($KSM) came in second and third place respectively. Notably Optimism ($OP) came right after, ahead of other major digital assets.
The term “development activity” refers to the amount of work completed by a cryptocurrency project’s developers on the project’s public GitHub repositories within the past 30 days.
Unlike other measures, Santiment’s metric focuses on “events” rather than the total number of commits. Events encompass various actions taken on GitHub repositories, such as pushing a commit, forking a repository, or creating an issue.
This approach provides a more accurate representation of the developers’ actual work, as it prevents duplication or inaccuracies that may occur when measuring development activity solely by commits.
For instance, forking creates a duplicate copy of a repository, including all previous commits. By counting the forking action as a single event, Santiment avoids falsely attributing older commits to new developers.
Santiment’s data comes at a time in which the total value locked on Cardano’s decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols has started dropping from a high above the $400 million mark, to now stand close to $330 million.
Despite the drop, some analysts are bullish on ADA. According to popular cryptocurrency analyst Ali Martinez, Cardano’s current consolidation phase mirrors that of late 2020, when the cryptocurrency was trading at around $0.10 per token.
In 2021, Cardano witnessed a significant price surge amid a wider cryptocurrency market bull run, surging to the $2 mark before correcting to $1.12 by mid-2021. The cryptocurrency then kept on surging, to hit an all-time high near the $3 mark. Cardano’s price then started dropping amid a wider crypto bear market, and now trades at $0.5 per token.
Per the analyst, if history repeats itself, ADA could resume its upward trend around April to hit $0.8 in the near future, before enduring a brief correction to $0.6. ADA’s price could then skyrocket to the $7 mark.
Featured image via Unsplash.
