Each month, we shine a spotlight on the 10 ERC-20 projects with the highest-recorded developer activity for the past 30 days, as calculated by Santiment.

Development Activity is an often-underrated indicator of project success, as it demonstrates the month-to-month commitment to creating a working product, continuously polishing and upgrading its features, and staying true to the long-term roadmap.

In this report, we are focusing only on ‘pure ERC-20’, i.e. those projects that are (currently) committed to developing on Ethereum, and have as of yet no working mainnet or an imminent token swap.

You can check out the latest dev activity ‘power rankings’ for all ERC-20 assets on Sanbase, by filtering the ERC-20 projects by Dev Activity (30d).

Here's what January’s busiest ERC-20 dapps have been working on:

1. Gnosis

“Since our last update, Gnosis launched the Conditional Tokens Explorer & Factory. The conditional tokens explorer enables users to mint, program, and redeem conditional tokens, an event-based asset class that comprises the building blocks of prediction markets and novel applications. The conditional tokens framework already powers popular decentralized prediction markets Omen and Polymarket today.

Coming up for 2021, we’ve been hard at work on Gnosis Protocol v2 and new DEX initiatives. Join the development process currently under discussion on GnosisDAO.

Keep your eyes on Safe Apps too, as SushiSwap and more decentralized finance protocols come to the Gnosis Safe Multisig.”

2. Status

“January was a busy month across the Status Network. Here is a look back at what was done

• Status app:
• Desktop beta v0.1.0 beta.4 was launched is now launched and introduces a suite of features that bring the desktop client closer to parity with the mobile app.
• Mobile App, v1.10 was released and introduces Profile Images and Dapp bookmarks to more easily access your favorite DApps. The mobile app saw a peak in active peers in the network showing steady growth in the product.
• Keycard - the keycard team has been working on simplifying the process to migrate a standard Status account onto a Keycard. The feature will be available in the next release.
• Vac - The team made progress on Waku v2 with the general theme of making the Waku network more scalable and robust by moving to libp2p, introduce better routing, and accounting and user-run nodes”

3. UMA

“UMA protocol has been experiencing a surge of developer activity, in no small part due to the launch of developer mining, which rewards developers with a share of 50,000 $UMA distributed weekly. In January, there were 11 new price IDs and 3 new collaterals added.

Jarvis, a team building on UMA, launched a novel contract type that is the first of its kind.

The core developers have also released major protocol updates: the optimistic oracle, the perpetual, and the ability to accept ancillary data. The perpetual will allow for perpetual synthetics--until now they have all been expiring. The optimistic oracle allows for price requests to be resolved optimistically, rather than requiring a vote each time.

Finally, the ability to accept ancillary data means that UMA's oracle can be used to bring other truths on chain than only price. This powerful feature would let UMA secure and resolve many types of markets, including prediction and betting markets of all kinds. UMA's medium-term goal is to help making building DeFi products easier and more secure, and developers are noticing.”

4. Chainlink

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Chainlink community update:

“Given our security focused approach, we are proud to announce the launch of the Chainlink On-Chain Data Directory using ENS, which creates an easily-identifiable on-chain index of Chainlink Price Feed addresses, providing users with additional assurances that they are relying on and/or sending funds to the right on-chain address.

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a decentralized protocol for the creation of human-readable domain names that point to specific on-chain addresses or contracts. Because ENS stores all metadata on-chain, as long as the Ethereum network continues to operate, users will be able to discover and connect their contracts to Chainlink Price Feeds in a straightforward and decentralized manner.

The key benefits of the Chainlink On-Chain Data Directory include:

• Human-readable domain names for each on-chain Chainlink Price Feed
• Censorship resistant discoverability of Chainlink Price Feeds using on-chain data
• Seamless tracking of Price Feed upgrades through on-chain ENS events
• Additional decentralization of the Chainlink ecosystem as a whole
• An open standard that any developer or project can adopt for their own protocol”

Find more information about Chainlink’s on-chain data directory here.

5. Skale

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Skale community update:

“The holidays were amazing, but time to get back to our regular schedule of Code & Dapps updates.

Product

• Finalizing cryptography audit
• Bug fixing skale chains and IMA
• Gas optimizations
• Launched new testnet
• Opened up management system (issues and pull requests can now be seen on github)

Solutions engineering

• Grants in place for some new partnerships
• Refacing the block explorer

Marketing

• Use case and partner marathon is launched!
• Ambassador program live
• Schwag store update (design)

Stay tuned for more.”

6. Ocean

“After finding steady footing post-launch from the heavy traffic spikes, we first concentrated on fixing the most bothersome bugs we and our community found. After the market interface and all components in the background were stabilized, we went into the next phase of adding new smaller features iteratively based on user feedback, and shipping features like The Graph integration for all displayed financial data.

While both of those phases will be ongoing with bug fixes and new features shipping continuously, we moved into a next phase where we iterate on the big picture items leading up to v4.”

7. Decentraland

“Happy new year from the metaverse! The team at Decentraland fell into 2021 after a huge Xmas Week and NYE bash, featuring DJ RAC. They’ve spent the month working on a range of new features in preparation for a major retro arcade collaboration with Atari, the first Game Jam of the year and first anniversary celebrations at the end of February:

In-world Builder: You’ll be able to build scenes while being present in the world, enabling real-time collaboration between creators and better contextual awareness of what’s around you as you build.

Portable Experiences: Users will be able to carry an experience – such as a treasure hunt or shooting game – around with them wherever they go in the world. Portable experiences can be linked to a wearable or exist on their own.

Formatic Login: Newcomers to crypto will be able to log in with a more familiar ‘user/password’ format. This will create a wallet for them in Formatic, onboarding them easily into crypto and enabling them to access more advanced functionalities of the platform.

Enhanced Quests: Making quests will be much easier thanks to tools that combine actions spanning multiple scenes into a single directed narrative, simplify reward distribution for completed quests and enable the creation of achievements that reward exploration.

Ambient Occlusion: Visually, everything is going to stand out more in the metaverse as the team rolls out improvements to the engine, providing better lighting effects. Players will be able to toggle these new lighting features to suit.

More major announcements can be found at blog.decentraland.org and on Twitter @decentraland. Events in the virtual world are updated daily at events.decentraland.org”

8. Augur

Here’s an excerpt from Augur’s latest community update:

“When Augur v1 was deployed ETH was already in a yearly downward trend and continued that direction for most of v1's lifespan. [...] Today it's much the opposite, with more favorable market conditions and users interested in trading with alternative settlement currencies to DAI.

Many long term crypto holders do not want to lower their exposure to ETH or BTC in todays market conditions. However, there are still many traditional bettors and traders who still prefer to use a stable currency and do not want additional market exposure when they're trading.

The first ParaAugur has been deployed for wETH, an add-on for parallel versions of Augur v2 with their own separate collateral types and order books. There are now two UI's for Augur, one for ETH and one for DAI. You can start trading on AugurETH via augur.net.

AugurETH is simply a parallel deployment of the trading functions of Augur. There is no ability to create markets or report on this deployment. Instead, markets are created on Augur v2's base layer and a version is populated in each parallel deployment.

You can read more about how ParaAug works in our previous blog post. ParaAug's deployment lays the foundation required for Augur to begin introducing new trading experiences and iterating faster at a protocol level. Building on this foundation will be the forthcoming AugurAMM, the Betting Exchange UI and additional ParaAug deployments with UI support (such as one trading on a L2). “

9. Maker

Here’s an excerpt from Maker’s latest community update:

• “Governance Updates
  

The Maker Governance Review is a monthly recap of all Governance activity. Each review is written to keep the Maker community informed of Governance developments.

An executive vote to activate the DsChief 1.2 to mitigate the risk of governance attack posed by flash-loans passed on December 11.

The Maker community now hosts weekly governance Q &; A sessions. All are welcome to attend and learn more about how Maker governance works.

• Community Highlights
  

ICYMI: The Redesigned MakerDAO Community Development Portal is Live.

To stay current on Maker Community meetings, bookmark our Community Playlist on YouTube.

• Event Recaps
  

On January 18, The Maker Foundation’s Head of Business Development, Greg Diprisco, participated in a talk titled The Global Business of Tokenization: Challenges and Opportunities! The panel discussion, part of a series of webinars on startups, was produced by Starterbites Ventures in association with Ctech Events.

• Worth Repeating
  

Zero to One Billion Dai: Five Years of Growth for MakerDAO

In November, the Maker Protocol hit the milestone of 1 billion Dai in circulation. This post includes an infographic of the highlights from the five years since the concept for the Dai stablecoin was announced.”

10. Synthetix

“January was a month of planning and building for the Synthetix community. Here are some high-level updates:

• Kain Warwick, Founder of Synthetix wrote about what you can expect from Synthetix in 2021 in his article “Synthetix 2021”
• A new incentivized pool for sEUR was added to Curve
• SNX staking went live on L2
• sUNI, sAAVE, sCOMP, sREN, sDOT, and sYFI are launching today
• Users can earn SNX rewards for short selling sBTC and sETH
• Synths with market closures, such as sNIKKEI on weekends, will be suspended upon market closure

Synthetix is the derivatives liquidity protocol for developers. Our vision is for developers to leverage Synthetix’s ability to tokenize assets across industries to gain access to important markets inside and out of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, unlocking a new world of highly accessible, unstoppable financial tools.

Expect much more from the Synthetix community soon. Stay up-to-date on Synthetix by following us on Twitter or join the community on Discord. “