Chainstack publishes report looking at growth of enterprise blockchain protocols.
The team of Chainstack, creators of an accessible and easy-to-use platform to build, run and scale blockchain applications — has published a report on the Growth of Enterprise Blockchain Protocols.
Chainstack analyzed Six Enterprise Blockchain Protocols (Hyperledger Fabric, R3 Corda, Baseline, Autonity, Quorum, Hyperledger Besu) for preparing this detailed research intensive report.
Based on their findings in the report, The clear leaders in the enterprise blockchain space are Hyperledger Fabric, R3 Corda, and Ethereum based protocols.
Key Findings Include:
- Hyperledger Besu—an Ethereum-based protocol— attracts the largest developer interest and engagement relative to the actual number of pushes it produces.
- Baseline as the newcomer in the enterprise blockchain space has attracted more developers right from the start than any other Ethereum-based protocol in this report and that has more time in the market.
- Autonity has the highest code contributions per developer on average.
- The developer activity has peaked in Q2 2020 majorly on the back of a spike in Hyperledger Fabricrelated developer events.
- Hyperledger Fabric has significantly jumped in developer popularity in 2020 as a major Fabric version released—version 2 whose main feature is a reworked lifecycle of decentralized applications, focused mainly on a decentralized approach.
- For the past three years, Corda has consistently pushed more compared to all the other protocols analyzed.
- Corda and Fabric share the highest unique developer numbers in their pools. At 124 unique developers, it’s 10.97% of Corda developers showing interest in Fabric, and 2.48% of Fabric developers showing interest in Corda.
Total unique developers engaged per protocol

Hyperledger Fabric is the leader in the total unique developers engaged.
Hyperledger, overall, being a Linux Foundation organization and clearly having the Linux open source culture and mentality, has the highest unique developer numbers. Besu, having joined Hyperledger in 2019, enjoined a significant increase in unique developers engaged.
Total activity per protocol year to year

Hyperledger Fabric enjoyed a steep jump in developer activity numbers in 2020, which coincided with the release of Fabric version 2. The version 2 itself is a significant shift in how decentralized applications operate on Fabric—the approach is more decentralized. Due to the nature of these changes—easy to understand and following the general decentralization trend of the space—this makes Fabric version 2 an popular engagement target with the developers, something that many can get along with.
Chainstack Protocol Vitality Index (CPVI) 2020
To have a representation of how each of the protocols analyzed is doing, Chainstack have created a new model, the Chainstack Protocol Vitality Index (CPVI) to help represent with a simple score on the scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the least vital and 10 is the most vital.
The index is a result of calculating the unique developer numbers, pushes, releases, and net new developers with a weight distribution. We consider each of these factors foundationally important to getting an easy-to-glimpse snapshot of how a protocol is doing and to be able to compare it to others :
Unique developers — the number of unique developers involved in contributing to the protocol. If a developer account triggers at least one event to the protocol on GitHub, the account is counted as a unique developer.
Pushes — the number of total code pushes to all repositories of the protocol.
Releases — the number of all releases on GitHub. This includes the newer protocol version releases and the past version maintenance releases. Both new and maintenance releases are important to understanding the vitality of the project.
Net new developers — the number of new unique developer accounts that contributed to the protocol in the analyzed period of time. Weight — added weight to keep the score within the conventional score of 10.

Fabric and Corda come at the top, followed by Besu and Quorum.
Conclusion
The health of each of the protocols analyzed for the year of 2020 is represented by the Chainstack Protocol Vitality Index (CPVI) and is telling the same story of Fabric and Corda being the top ones, and the Ethereum-based Besu and Quorum following immediately after.
If you are looking to get into the enterprise blockchain space, your most efficient move is to experiment either with Fabric, Corda, or an Ethereumbased protocol, or ideally evaluate all three of them.
The report can be accessed and downloaded here-
Enterprise Blockchain Protocols Evolution Index 2021
Hitesh Malviya is the Founder of ItsBlockchain. He is one of the most early adopters of blockchain & cryptocurrency enthusiast in India. After being into space for a few years, he started IBC in 2016 to help other early adopters learn about the technology.
Before IBC, Hitesh has founded 4 companies in the cyber security & IT space.
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