Chainlink, Cardano high developer activity could spark price rally

Crypto intelligence firm Santiment released on Thursday a list of altcoins with the most developer activity in the past 30 days. The report shows that Chainlink (LINK), Cardano (ADA), and a surprise 2017 token called Status have been more attractive to developers, indicating they may see a price boost when these developments come to fruition.

Chainlink and Cardano take the lead

According to Santiment's report, Chainlink and Cardano have the highest scores in developer activity, with 451.23 and 444.7 points, respectively. LINK's increasing developer activity may also signify increased development to pursue integrations and onboard institutions into its platform.

Although the price of LINK and ADA is yet to reflect the impact of the news. LINK is up about 1% while ADA  has posted only  a 0.6% increase in the last 224 hours.

Additionally, Status, a surprise altcoin from the ICO boom in 2017, also made it to the top positions of the list, occupying the number three spot with 434.5 points. Status, poised to be a competitor to apps like Telegram and Discord, raised $100 million for its native token SNT in 2017 but has since suffered several hiccups in bringing its product to market. However, an announcement in November on its X account says it would launch beta and alpha versions of its app soon.

Other altcoins from the active developer list from Santiment include Optimism (OP), Hedera (HBAR), Polkadot (DOT), Kusama (KSM), Internet Computer (ICP), Ethereum (ETH), and Cosmos (ATOM).

Top altcoins by developer activity

Read more: Week Ahead: Altcoins to restart the uptrend with Nvidia's AI conference

Why Solana didn’t make the list

One key insight from the list is that Solana, which has surged recently in terms of the number of projects on its platform, price, total value locked (TVL), and daily active users (DAU), among many other metrics, didn't make the list. While this may show that developer activity should not be relied upon as a stand-alone metric for potential price growth, the methodology used by Santiment also shows another important factor.

Santiment said in an X post that it "pulls notable GitHub activity from project repositories via a back-tested process to ensure only the team's significant efforts to innovate and improve are included”. They further went on to say in a Medium post that they favor tracking events as opposed to committs as it helps to increase accuracy in their analysis. The events include the number of code pushes, issue interactions, Github wiki edits, comments on commits, etc. This ensures real developer activity is tracked instead of events inherited from forks and by just committing code according to the post.

Also read: Bitcoin Weekly Forecast: BTC may have recovered, but is it out of the woods?

As a result, it's important to watch how developer activity in the altcoins listed here may affect their price performance. In a separate list of top AI coins with the highest developer activity by Santiment, Near Protocol (NEAR) and Oasis Network (ROSE) made it to the top.