We cannot predict the exact trajectory and impact of blockchain technology. But we also should not ignore its early stages of development and successes along with failures. Tracking this young technology’s development could potentially maximize its potential to best serve us.
FIGURING
out how foundational technologies, such as the Internet or mobile, morph and grow is not easy. New technologies often attract a wide variety of developers, including many freelancers from around the world. The sheer number of developers, the types of problems they are trying to solve, and the geographic spread can make it difficult to anticipate where any new technology is headed.
But perhaps the fundamental difference with blockchain development is that it has largely been orchestrated in the open-source environment. Bitcoin, the original blockchain system, was birthed in open source.
Accordingly, in an effort to better understand the development of blockchain and its ecosystem, we have conducted an extensive data analysis of blockchain projects in an open-source environment. Our study appears to be the first empirical attempt to understand the evolution of blockchain using metadata available on GitHub, a global software collaboration platform.
We chose GitHub because it is the largest known software collaboration platform in the world, with more than 68 million projects and 24 million participants GitHub also appears to host the most important projects for the blockchain community. The activity on GitHub provides a unique opportunity to identify who is behind blockchain’s development, what type of programming is powering it, where the talent resides, how networks and communities of projects and developers are organized, and what risk factors exist for investing resources into repositories.
Financial services firms seem to be leading the way in blockchain applicability; they currently have the most commercial use cases of blockchain in the marketplace. Our findings could help firms improve their ability to identify successful projects and opportunities based on how the blockchain ecosystem is evolving.
Unless otherwise cited, all data and statistics that we report on blockchain activity on GitHub in this paper is a result of our analysis of the GH Torrent project and the GitHub API (see the sidebar, “Study methodology”.