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.

As it is the end of the year, we're shining a spotlight on the top 10 ERC-20 projects with the highest-recorded developer activity for the past 365 days, as calculated by Santiment.

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).

We've asked all of the year’s most active ERC-20 dapps if they can recap their biggest 2019 milestones for us. Here’s what they said:

1. Status

“We’re thrilled to be #1 for dev activity! 2019 has been an epic journey for us - evolving from our initial objective of building the core Status app as an Ethereum portal, to seeding and growing The Status Network (statusnetwork.com). We were (and still are!) driven by a mission to put designs, tools, and coordination in people's hands to enable them to take back the web.

Our small band of core contributors (and our awesome community contributors) worked tirelessly in 2019 to build decentralized technologies ranging from protocol-level infrastructure to consumer applications — forming an open source peer-to-peer technology stack. Expect big things from us in 2020 - Status v1 mobile app launch, SNT utilities coming to life, Keycard’s open source payment network, and so much more.”

2. Storj

“2019 has been a year of milestones for Storj Labs. The Storj network has been rebuilt from the ground up to support enterprise use cases and compete head-to-head with public cloud providers. The company launched its Beta, and the network quickly grew into a swarm of over 5,000 Storage Node Operators across the globe. Storj Labs production release of its Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage service is right around the corner and should be released in a few weeks.

In 2019, the Storj Labs team was able to deliver cloud storage performance that is more consistent, and at times faster than AWS, at half the cost (https://storj.io/blog/2019/11/measuring-production-readiness-using-qualification-gates/)

Leaky Amazon S3 buckets were the security story of 2019. Examples include:

• A data exposure containing 540 million records from multiple third-party developed Facebook apps.
• Leak of GoDaddy's trade secrets and detailed infrastructure information.
• A breach by Localblox, a private intelligence platform that exposed 48 million records of detailed personal information on tens of millions of individuals, gathered and scraped from multiple sources.
• The exposure of 14 million customer records by telecommunications carrier Verizon, an example of how third-party risk contributes to this problem.
• Viacom, who left a trove of system credentials and critical application data exposed in an open S3 bucket.
• The Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, who leaked the personal details of 527,000 individuals in a misconfigured S3 bucket.

Storj has been engineered to prevent this security hole through client-side encryption and its decentralized IAM construct, which allow developers to granularly share content, and reduces security to key management (https://storj.io/blog/2019/12/secure-access-control-in-the-decentralized-cloud/)

2020 will be the most important year for Storj Labs yet, as the company will launch its service, add new features, and start accepting paying customers.”

3. Gnosis

“At Gnosis, we've had an extremely productive year and achieved major team milestones. In Q4, the Sight prediction market platform launched in closed beta. Sight builds on the conditional tokens framework, that we hope to see become an open standard for prediction markets and many other use cases. In addition to that, we launched the Gnosis Safe Multisig, the successor to the community-favorite, original Gnosis multi-signature wallet, with added security, usability, and modularity.

We've also been happy to see many community initiatives take flight. We held our second annual DappCon, a conference focused on Ethereum development and applications in Berlin; our co-founded workspace for blockchain and web 3.0 initiatives Full Node has a growing community; and the independent initiative the dxDAO continues to make moves in decentralized governance.

Still, we're even more excited for 2020 with the public launch of Sight prediction markets and a totally new and innovative trading protocol on the way—more on that soon! If you want to get involved, check out our grants program, the Gnosis Ecosystem Fund.”

4. Aragon

“The Aragon community had a number of exciting milestones in 2019. The year started with AraCon 2019 - the first edition of the Aragon conference, featuring an amazing and diverse lineup of presenters and panelists from the decentralized governance and Web3 movements. Then-Aragon Association Executive Director (and current Advisory Board member) Stefano Bernardi declared 2019 the Year of the DAO, and by the end of 2019 we saw nearly 1000 Aragon organizations created on mainnet and over 2.4 million DAI and 2400 ETH deposited into their vaults, along with the release of the long-awaited Aragon Court v1.0 contracts (full launch coming soon).

These achievements were enabled by three major Aragon client releases and about a dozen minor releases throughout the year. These releases introduced powerful new features and Aragon apps, such as the introduction of the App Center and app upgradeability from the frontend client with Aragon 0.7 Bella, the release of email notifications and the Aragon Agent app with Aragon 0.8 Camino, the release of the Open Enterprise template with Aragon 0.8.4, and independent app releases such as Tollgate and Approval by Pocket Network, custom DAO apps by MyBit, and a unique integration with Reddit by Carl Larson. And of course, these releases themselves were enabled by continued maintenance and updates to the underlying smart contracts and aragonSDK, including major aragonCLI and aragonUI releases and the introduction of aragonDS, the new Aragon design system.

We are looking forward to building on this momentum in 2020 and working together as a community to continue improving Aragon as a development platform and making Aragon organizations both easier to create and more powerful to use. Join us by checking out the Aragon Developer Portal and "good first issues" in the Aragon GitHub organization, and dropping into the #dev channel on Aragon Chat, and if you want to work on projects like these full time check out job openings in the Aragon ecosystem.”

5. Augur

“ 2019 has been a BIG year for Augur development.

The team has worked painstakingly on a complete re-write of the platform for Augur v2. As this year wraps up we're working through a small list of unsolved issues found during audits, and are finishing up the Augur v2 integration with 0x trading. All of that work has been done in tandem with releases of Augur v1 to address a number of community concerns, such as giving clearer warnings when markets are likely to be invalid.

2020 will be all about Augur V2. With the current code in its final stages and entering QA and Testing passes, we're looking forward to launching Augur V2 during Q1 of 2020.  This release will include a huge number of architectural changes that make it so trading will be faster and cheaper, Markets will resolve much more quickly, users can trade in Dai, and the UX has been optimized to work well for people used to using betting exchanges.

Getting Augur V2 out the door has been a long effort, but we're excited to be complete this long engineering task and let users actually get all the benefits that it provides."

6. Golem

“2019 has been a year of changes for Golem - actually, 2018 was also a year of changes... mainly because our team never settles and is always curious and open for new things. On April we announced the birth of the Graphene project and working group, together with Intel, Invisible Things Lab and many collaborators. Curiously, that same day, we were celebrating the first anniversary of the Golem Mainnet launch :) The Graphene project grew throughout the year, and finally in September, the first stable release was announced.

On the Golem software side - we released our second use-case, gWASM in July and in October, in an unparalleled sprint by our awesome team, gWASM was launched into mainnet. This is a very important milestone, as gWASM is a meta-usecase that allows you to build decentralized applications on top of Golem, quite easily. You can read more about it here.

Golem Unlimited grew as well - not only partnering with Hoard to build a code compiler, which we continue to work on, but also the work on this product is ongoing, and we were able to demo it together with gWASM at DEVCON5 in Osaka, where we did an interesting workshop that left us hungry for more. Stay tuned for new editions!

Now we're getting ready for the launch of our Task API coming in a big release around mid-January - but as we grow as a company and project, there are more changes in the horizon, not so far away, so watch this space (yes, we mean Santiment, as we're coding a lot to make it to the top 10 ;) and you'll learn more soon!”

7. 0x

Here’s an excerpt from 0x’s annual report:

“With the emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi) and a more competitive DEX landscape in 2019, our focus shifted to liquidity and R&D. On the liquidity front, we built out our data pipelines to analyze liquidity across the various DEX solutions and established the 0x Market Maker Program.

Over 100 teams submitted applications and four teams were selected to participate in the first cohort. By Q3, the prices available on 0x markets were frequently uncontested by alternative open DEX solutions. On the R&D front, we heavily invested in a number of medium-term projects including 0x protocol v3.0, the new ZRX token economics, Mesh, scalability, and Bridge contracts. A number of these R&D projects are just wrapping up, setting the stage for an exciting 2020.

Trading activity for ERC20 tokens remained split across multiple 0x relayers in 2019. Radar Relay — the first open orderbook relayer to launch on top of 0x protocol — remained the de facto source of contract-fillable liquidity for DeFi dApps. Tokenlon was a major new entrant to the space, launched as the native DEX solution within imToken, the most popular mobile wallet in Asia with over one million users. Tokenlon built a request-for-quote (RFQ) system on 0x that supports aggressive prices and that is accessible through their mobile wallet and recently launched web portal.

ImToken initially used Kyber as their DEX solution; by switching to a novel RFQ system on 0x, they were able to support custom assets (imBTC, imATOM, imEOS) and monetize trading volume. Ethfinex, a matching relayer that mirrors the Bitfinex orderbook, spun off from Bitfinex and rebranded as DeversiFi. Paradex, the matching relayer acquired by Coinbase, appears to still be live for non-US peoples.”

8. Loom

Loom Network was featured several times this year in our monthly reports. In May, the project wrote:

“The Loom team has been hustling over the past few months! A major focus has been around staking and onboarding external validators to PlasmaChain mainnet. We initially launched the PlasmaChain staking dashboard, which allows any LOOM holder to delegate their tokens to help secure the network and earn rewards in return. Since then, we released several feature enhancements and support for mobile staking, so delegators can stake directly from their mobile wallets (such as imToken and Cobo). To make that possible, we built out Universal Transaction Signing, which means PlasmaChain can verify and accept transactions signed by native Layer 1 wallets.

We've also been focused on several interoperability initiatives. First, we integrated the top 100 ERC20 tokens on PlasmaChain, adding support for payments in 6 major stablecoins. Additionally, we've kicked off integrations with several other major blockchains to make PlasmaChain a universal layer 2 hub. We are building out token bridges to EOS, TRON, and Cosmos (with more to come) to give the developers building on Loom seamless access to the largest pool of users with the least friction possible.”

Some of the more recent milestones from the Loom team include:

• “Kicked off Bitcoin integration on Basechain, giving developers a simple interface to send and receive BTC for zero fees and with instant confirmation times
• Onboarded new validators, Huobi and Axie Infinity
• Supported launch of several 3rd party dapps on Basechain -- Neon District, Blocklords, Crazy House, and others
• Released support for WalletConnect
• Released Build 1328 Hard Fork -- including improvements for sending Ethereum transactions using the eth_sendRawTransaction JSON-RPC method, validator node monitoring, Eth performance enhancements.
• As part of a Transfer Gateway upgrade (scheduled for Nov 12), added a new API for interacting with Eth gateway contracts.”

9. Poa

POA Network is an Ethereum-based platform that offers an open-source framework for smart contracts

“At POA, we are firm believers in the open-source nature of decentralized technologies.

Our interoperability team of TokenBridge project delivered Arbitrary Message Bridge, which can relay any existing and future token standards between two chains with only one set of validators. We upgraded xDai Bridge, which is powering the first-ever USD stable chain to support multi-collateral Dai and alternative receivers.

As we can see the harsh regulatory environment around the globe, we continue to work on censorship-resistant consensus algorithm Honeybadger BFT and a complimentary POSDAO (Solidity) DPOS consensus algorithm.

BlockScout, the first full-featured blockchain explorer, is used by many ethereum sidechains, forks, scalability solutions received everyday attention from our dev team.“

10. Raiden Network

The Raiden Network was featured in our monthly reports several times this year, Back in February, the team said:

“In February, the Raiden team released Pluto, the first patch release for the Raiden client since the alpha mainnet release in December. It contains several bug fixes, hence updating from v0.100.1 (Red Eyes) is highly recommended. Furthermore, the development towards Ithaca, the next milestone, progressed: An integrated Raiden services prototype (including both monitoring and pathfinding service) has been put together and a basic implementation of the new smart contracts has been deployed on multiple testnets. Have a look at our bi-monthly development updates for more information!”

More recently, the Raiden team mentioned they were focusing on several initiatives, mainly:

“ • Refactoring the Matrix transport layer, especially tackling the “presence bug”

• Performance optimization for the pathfinding service

• Extensive testing and debugging in preparation for the next mainnet release

• Adding new scenarios to the testing suite

Besides that, work on the Raiden Light Client SDK and UI progressed steadily. Last but not least, we are preparing our onboarding and installation tool, the Raiden Wizard, for the upcoming mainnet release „Alderaan“ by adding more functionalities and are continuously extending the content of our revised docs 2.0 with tutorials and walkthroughs.”

Here's to another great year for Ethereum dapps!