Question in detail:

With Electric Capital’s release of its annual report on developer activity, the topic of “developers” is a hot topic across crypto.

Produce a rich analysis of NEAR developer activity, using metrics and definitions of your choice to answer the questions:

• How many developers are active on NEAR?
• How active are they?
• How this has changed over time?

Overview of analysis:

This dashboard divided into the following parts:

• Contracts on Near blockchain
• Developers of Near blockchain

Various metrics on these parts are introduced on the Methodology section.

Methodology:

The data provided by Flipside has been used to handle this analysis. To handle this investigation the following steps have been passed as below:

• The contacts deployment on Near

  • How to find contracts→ distinct TX_RECEIVER

    FROM near.core.fact_actions_events_function_call a INNER JOIN near.core.fact_transactions b ON a.TX_HASH = b.TX_HASH INNER JOIN near.core.fact_receipts as c ON a.TX_HASH=c.TX_HASH

    WHERE ACTION_NAME = 'FunctionCall' AND METHOD_NAME <> 'new'

  • Metrics→

    • New contracts
    • Contracts usage over the selected time frame
    • Most popular contracts (general and over time)
• Developers on Near
  • Table→ FROM near.beta.github_activity
  • Metrics→ Total and monthly count of developers on Near GitHub, State of developers
  • Developers behavior→ Distribution of developers by count of participation, retention period and count of active months
• Conclusion: By aggregating the outcomes of the previous parts and deep dive into the retention of users, draw a conclusion about the users retention on Flow and other Layer 1 chains.

About Near:

Near is a public, sharded, extensible blockchain network based on the proof-of-stake (POS) paradigm. Developers can use this platform to launch their own decentralized applications (similar to the Ethereum network). The token of this network is called NEAR, which is the functional token of this network. The main goal of the NEAR network is to create an infrastructure for creating a new Internet. In the new internet, it will be harder for big companies to access people's personal information. Countries cannot ban some programs and destroy their business in this system. A world of freedom where everyone can act freely.

This platform uses sharding technology to solve the problem of scalability. In this model, a transaction does not need to be checked by all network nodes. With sharding, a network is turned into several parallel networks that check transactions simultaneously, so that each transaction is checked in a shard. As a result, only nodes present in a shard will check and confirm this transaction, and other nodes present in other shards of the network will not check this transaction. This idea makes the capacity of the network increase significantly.

The NEAR protocol has provided the NightShade solution. Nightshade is the main technology of Nair blockchain. In the NightShade solution, sharding is applied to all blocks individually instead of the main chain. In this method and because all the blocks are divided between the nodes of the NIR network, the scalability of this network increases significantly. The mechanism of NightShade is that instead of sending transactions individually to each of the network nodes, they are divided among all nodes and run in parallel.

Currently, NEAR has improved its sharding capability in partnership with Octopus Network. Octopus allows developers to build their own blockchains. The chains created by Octopus are known as App Chains and are connected to the NEAR network through the Octopus Bridge, which is deployed as a smart contract.

Part 1: Contracts deployment on NEAR

Conclusion:

According to the consequences of the previous parts related to health of Near blockchain, the following conclusion could be drawn:

• The trend of launching new and intelligent contracts in the Near blockchain is increasing and the application of contracts has consistent trend over time but the sudden decrement after May 2022 should be considered in the evaluation of this part.
• One of the important parts related to the health of network is activity of developers and according to the outcomes, the pattern of new developers on Near has promising movement specially on 2022.
• In less than two years, the NEAR protocol has excelled in key technical benchmarks among other competitors, which bodes well for the platform as it continues to execute its roadmap. The vision of the NEAR protocol does not limit it to a specific ecosystem, but prepares it as an infrastructure for running all Web 3 applications. This can be seen by the activity of developers on Near GitHub.

Findings:

Finally, lets investigate on the contracts deployment on Near network:

• The application of contracts on Near blockchain have consistent movement but after May 2022, the contract usage on Near has been decreased over time.
• About 243 contracts have been added into the Near network since start of 2023.
• The investigation related to the new contracts on Near reveals that the highest count of new contracts has been added on the second week of September 2020 with over 1490 contracts.
• The most popular contracts on Near network are app.nearcrowd and Aurora and the difference of these two contracts with other ones are considerably large. The highest paid gas on contracts of Near belong to Aurora as can be seen.
• The most popular contracts on Near over time and monthly basis presents that in 2023, the token.sweat and app.nearcrowd are two of the most used contracts.

Findings:

Lets focus on the main part of this investigation and its by the activity of developers on Near:

• Total count of unique developers on Near GitHub is 2480 and the new developers since start of 2022 is about 1250.
• The most popular state of repository on Near GitHub is Merged and most of the developers Merge existing programs.
• Most of the developers on Near GitHub are contributor (beside NONE) with 897 unique developers.
• The monthly count of unique developers by created time on Near GitHub reveals that the highest count of developers participated on June, 2022 with 146 unique developers.
• The most active developer on Near GitHub is Dependabot and the most popular REPO on Near GitHub are Nearcore and Stakewars.

Part 2: NEAR developers

About Developers of Blockchains:

A blockchain developer steps in the process of developing this infrastructure. First we need to confirm that there are two different groups of blockchain developers. The first group is the block chain infrastructure developers (Core Blockchain Developer) and the second group is the block chain software developers (Blockchain Developer Software). Both groups are responsible for the development of the block chain.

A core blockchain developer designs the security and architecture of the proposed blockchain system. In fact, the underlying developer of the blockchain lays the foundation, or more precisely, the cornerstone, on which other components are implemented.

A blockchain developer's responsibility is to develop innovative solutions to challenging problems. This solution can be an attempt to control and maintain high integrity. Additionally, a developer is responsible for complex analysis, design, development, testing, and debugging of computer software, especially for specific hardware or service channels. Software design development also includes operational architecture integration and computer systems selection. Finally, developers work on multiple systems to ensure that the implemented infrastructure does not have any particular problems. Therefore, it is necessary for them to have appropriate information related to programming languages and technical infrastructure.

Useful links:

• Near blockchain
• Electric Capital’s release of its annual report on developer activity

Author:

Credited by MZG

Discord handle: m.zamani#0361

Twitter handle: @GargariZamani

Findings:

Now its time to find out how sticky are these developers?

• According to the outcomes, most of the developers on Near GitHub (49%) have been participated for just 1 time and its the popular group of developers.
• Also, the retention period of developers on Near GitHub is another metric that used to find out the behavior of developers. Based on the results, about 30% of developers has been created their second repository in the same week of first repo.
• The count of active months is useful and realistic metric to evaluate the behavior of Near GitHub developers. As can be seen, about 50% of developers were active on Near GitHub for 1 month and the next popular bucket belong to active for more than 6 months!