In an effort to understand the evolution of blockchain, consulting giant Deloitte has analysed the data 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 (figure 1). 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,” Jesus Leal Trujillo, Steve Fromhart, Val Srinivas wrote in an online post.

According to the authors, the number of projects on GitHub related to blockchain has grown significantly since 2009, averaging more than 8,600 new projects a year. In 2016 alone, there were almost 27,000 new projects.

However, while there are over 86,000 projects in the network, only 8 percent of the projects are actively maintained.

“The stark reality of open-source projects is that most are abandoned or do not achieve meaningful scale. Unfortunately, blockchain is not immune to this reality. Our analysis found that only 8 percent of projects are active, which we define as being updated at least once in the last six months. Here, organizations are a positive differentiator; while 7 percent of projects developed by users are active, 15 percent of projects developed by organizations are active,” they said.

“Note that about 90 percent of projects developed on GitHub become idle, and the average life span of a project is about one year, with the highest mortality rate occurring within the first six months.”

Highlighting the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, the authors said:

“In 2013, there were only three projects on GitHub related to Ethereum; in 2015, that number was 1,439; by mid-2017, it grew to 9,970. These projects have given rise to a wide variety of applications, such as identity management, crowdfunding and investment platforms, payments and remittances, new cryptocurrencies, and decentralized lending platforms.”