Deloitte has conducted an extensive data analysis of blockchain projects using metadata available on GitHub, a global software collaboration platform which plays home to the code for over 86,000 blockchain initiatives.
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.
Since 2009, the number of projects on GitHub related to blockchain has grown significantly, averaging more than 8,600 new projects a year. In 2016 alone, there were almost 27,000 new projects. The data for only the first six months of the year, 25000 GitHub projects were created over that period.
More organizations appear to be getting involved in the blockchain tech, whereby in 2010, organizations developed less than 1 percent of all projects. By 2017, their blockchain projects accounted for 11 percent.
Amongst the top blockchain code repositories, bitcoin has seen the most activity, with 627 total contributors and nearly 12,000 followers. Go-ethereum (or Geth), the software client maintained by the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, has drawn 149 contributors to date with 5,603 followers.
The stark reality of open-source projects like blockchain is that most are abandoned or do not achieve meaningful scale. Only 8 percent of projects are active, which is defined as being updated at least once in the last six months.
Organizations are a positive differentiator; while 7 percent of projects developed by users are active, 15 percent of projects developed by organizations are active.
San Francisco plays home to the most blockchain-related GitHub repository owners, with 1,279 users and 101 organizations. London scored the second-highest with 919 projects in total, followed by New York with 774.
Also the high level of activity in China, specifically, Shanghai and Beijing. In both of these cities, most of the projects pertain to cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges, with an emphasis on scalability.
