Deloitte's latest research uses metadata on the Github platform to conduct an empirical analysis of nearly 90,000 blockchain projects, track the evolution of blockchain technology since 2009, and help investors explore the essence through bubbles. The study also noted that Beijing and Shanghai are very active in blockchain activity. Due to the active Bitcoin projects, Beijing and Shanghai have ranked among the top 5 cities in the world for the distribution of open source blockchain talents.
It is predicted that the global blockchain technology market will reach $7.74 billion by 2024, with the financial services industry accounting for the majority of future market growth. According to a report by Grand View Research, a San Francisco-based market research and forecasting firm, “blockchain technology is one of the most promising technology trends in information technology.”
The report predicts continued growth in the U.S. and Canadian markets (40.9% of the market). Meanwhile, China and India will grow at a CAGR of 37.6% over the next 8 years as the financial industry adopts blockchain technology.
However, with increased regulation on all sides, it is time to look at blockchain rationally.
Deloitte released the report "Evolution of Blockchain Technology: Insights from the GitHub Platform", which used the metadata provided on GitHub, a global software collaboration platform for the first time, to analyze the evolution of blockchain technology and projects. In-depth empirical analysis was carried out.
According to this Deloitte report, over 50,000 blockchain-related projects were created on GitHub in 2016 and 2017. In comparison, fewer than 15,000 data were created in 2015.
The study traces the development of blockchain technology through various implementations (including Bitcoin) as early as 2009 using open source data.
Highlights of the report's findings include:
- Blockchain is flourishing in the open source world. In the current evolutionary stage of blockchain technology, developers are more interested in the development of open source blockchain solutions.
- Blockchain talent mostly lives in North America or Europe, with San Francisco having the highest concentration, followed by London and New York. Beijing and Shanghai were selected as Top 5 due to the active Bitcoin projects.
- The most popular programming language for blockchain development: C++ ranks first, Go ranks second.
- There are nearly 90,000 blockchain projects on Github, but only 8% are maintained, and the survival rate of fork projects is only 5%.
- The survey also made a Github blockchain TOP 20 list, with institutional players dominating.
1 GitHub research blockchain: identify project developers, where talent goes, and how to organize
We cannot predict the exact trajectory and impact of blockchain technology. However, we should also not ignore its early development, successes and failures. Tracking this emerging technology may maximize its potential.
Figuring out how underlying technologies such as the Internet or mobile phones have evolved is not easy. New technologies often attract a variety of developers. There are so many of them, and so many types of problems they are trying to solve, that it all makes predicting new technologies extremely difficult.
But maybe blockchain development is different, it's largely done in an open source environment. Bitcoin is the original blockchain system, which was generated with open source code.
Therefore, to better understand the development of blockchain and its ecosystem, we conducted extensive data analysis of blockchain projects in an open source environment. Our study is the first empirical study to understand blockchain evolution using metadata available on GitHub.
We chose GitHub because it is the world's largest software collaboration platform, with over 68 million projects and 24 million participants.