The State of Hedera
and the Open Source Crypto Ecosystem in 2024
Key Insights
- The innovation flow in the open source crypto ecosystem
- Developers bridging crypto ecosystems
- Key players in the open source crypto ecosystem
- The companies producing value in Hedera
- Engaging developers in Hedera’s community
- Who is developing Hedera’s core technology?
- The challenges in attracting and nurturing Hedera’s community
- Hedera’s community keeps the backlog under control
- The ROI of working in the open for Hedera
Executive Sumary
In this Bitergia Radar Report, we delve into the Hedera ecosystem and its relationship with other blockchain open source ecosystems, including key players and interdependencies, as well as challenges and opportunities within Hedera.
The analysis of the Hedera ecosystem and its relationship with other blockchain ecosystems shows two main ways of producing software and value for their respective communities. A more interconnected ecosystem where smaller projects are creating value on existing technologies by consuming and contributing back as the Ethereum – Avalanche – Polygon – BNB Chain group; and others as Cardano, XRP, or Hedera, where development takes place more independently.
This interconnection density allows those projects to produce value faster, as they incorporate existing technology, but at the same time this brings a high dependency on this base technology, in this case, Ethereum. This overlap across projects creates bridges and commonalities where the effort of more than 150 developers is directly consumed by the satellite projects to grow its core technology.
These commonalities do not exist between Hedera and the other analyzed ecosystems and this does not affect the development pace within the project. Company contributors are clearly focused on the core areas of the development as Consensus Node and Ledger versus the Tooling and Applications layers. The latter two areas are at the same time the ones attracting most of the new contributors which indicates new opportunities to grow the community.
The evolution of the community is positive, with hundreds of thousands of lines produced by several dozens of contributors not affiliated with Hashgraph, especially out of the core parts of the project. This is followed by a growth in the backlog which may require extra care from the main company to avoid burnout of those third parties contributing to the project.
A Foundation of Open-Source Effort:
This report, analyzing Hedera’s ecosystem, is fundamentally built upon the contributions of the open source community. We extend our sincere appreciation to the dozens of contributors, particularly those outside of Hashgraph, who have dedicated their efforts to enriching the Hedera ecosystem.
Authors
Miguel Angel Fernández Sánchez (Bitergia), Daniel Izquierdo (Bitergia),
Luis Cañas-Díaz (Bitergia), Igor Zubiaurre (Bitergia), Julia Lawson (Bitergia)
Peer reviewed by:
Jiahua Xu (Exponential Science), Diane Mueller (Bitergia / Hedera), Paolo Tasca (Exponential Science), Marco Alberto Javarone (Exponential Science)
