J.Hackworth

Posted on Feb 03, 2023Read on Mirror.xyz

Osmosis Developer Activity

Introduction

With Electric Capital’s recent Developer Report and Repository made publically available, there are endless opportunities to analyze protocol development through Electric’s repository. The protocol I decided to focus on was Osmosis. Osmosis is the biggest decentralized exchange on Cosmos that allows users to trade via AMM model. I created a python ETL script and Google Dashboard, which is the main focus on my analysis, I dug into the development activity for the protocol. Dashboard link can be founder here:

https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/0da14731-a3af-4909-b7c2-7ecc9d92cee1/page/1tyDD

Methodology

Using Electric’ Developer Repo, I pulled all of the related Osmosis repos and queried the commits data using the Github API. I then created various metrics in the following jupyter notebook:

https://github.com/jhackworth42/Crypto-Analytics/blob/main/Dev%20Report.ipynb

The data was then all compiled into the looker dashboard above

Key Insights

Osmosis Launched on Jun. 19th, 2021, and the number of commits heavily rose until May 2022 which happened to coincide with the collapse of Luna

One of the biggest takeaways when looking into this was that a lot of the “Osmosis-Lab” activity was not actually Osmosis but the greater Cosmos ecosystem that was used in Osmosis such as Tendermint, metamask, and the cosmos-sdk. Osmosis-frontend are 5th and 6th respectively for total unique developers

Similarly, you can see that some of the top developers are more involved in the overall Comsos ecosystem vs Osmosis. The founder of Osmosis, Sunny Agarwawal, has over 800+ commits for Osmosis.

You can take these insights a few ways. 1) What is considered in Electric Capital’s report may be a bit inflated and there are duplicated values or 2) Its hard to measure at a specific protocol due to how many interconnected parts are involved 3) Protocol’s development is intertwined with the greater ecosystem’s success

Beyond this some other insights include:

  1. Most development activity is concentrated in a few repos and a few core developers. 9 developers did close to 40% of the total commits.

  2. Most “part time” & new contributors tend not to stay with in the Osmosis development ecosystem . In fact 75% of developers that have committed to an Osmosis’s labs repo have not been active in 90+ days and 50% of developers only have 1 commit

As mentioned previously, there was a large spark in developer activity during the Luna hype/crash. However, most of those developers were just part-time. The core contributors saw much less of a drop-off and continue to ship high-quality code.

In fact, when we look at some of Osmosis’s key repos, there is not as big of a drop off and the number of active developers has increased

Osmosis continues to ship!

Conclusion

Some of the key takeaways:

  • While, a lot of Osmosis commits are the owners, they actually just forked repos from tendermint, cosmos-sdk, and so forth

  • The highpoint for developer activity is similar to the high of Luna, both have come crashing down but there has been a resurgence

  • Most part time contributors only have 1 commit. Developer activity is concentrated in a few core developers

I hope you enjoyed this and feel free to provide any feedback to @jphackworth42 on twitter