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Since major enterprises started taking blockchain seriously and looking at the technology’s potential in their chosen arena, so have a number of popular enterprise-grade blockchain solutions have come to the fore.
Some of these solutions are sold to companies as an all in one solution, slightly deviating from some of the core decentralized and open-sourced pillars of the technology, but the more popular ones are open-sourced and constantly being developed.
The likes of Hyperledger Fabric, as well as Sawtooth and Besu, R3 Corda, and Quorum are all open source solutions that have been tracked for developer activity by Blockchain service firm Chainstack.
The information from Chainstack shows how Corda, from its inception in Q4 2016, has been a firm favourite in attracting developers to work on the project. But, as of Q3 of last year, Hyperledger Fabric overtook the R3 chain for the first time.
Fabric vs Corda
These two blockchain solutions are prominent in some of the world’s biggest enterprises who have decided to delve into the blockchain space. Looking at the Forbes 50 list of top enterprises using blockchain technology one can see 22 out of the 50 companies chose to use Fabric.
For Corda, 14 of the top 50 companies used that blockchain with there being a number of overlaps where the likes of Allianz SE, ING, Intel, Microsoft and others made use of both those chains.
With regards to the developer action, it makes for interesting reading as Corda was miles ahead when it burst onto the scene, but Fabric has seen a recent spike thanks to its move to GitHub in November 2019.
From the data, it is shown that there are 17,561 unique developers working on Fabric, while 5,678 are developing Corda. Additionally, Corda developers made more than double the code contributions at 30,382 to Fabric’s 12,439.
The analysis also showed that Fabric consistently has the lowest average amount of pushes per developer. For Corda, they boasted a group of dedicated contributors that push new code full-time.
The report also shows that Corda, Fabric and Quorum — an Ethereum fork for businesses — account for 86 percent of the total number of unique developers that pushed code in the space.
Good for business
This back-end developer action may go over the heads of many business decision-makers, but it is an important metric to examine. What it shows is that as the demand for new blockchain solutions develops and become more intricate, there are people out there working to make the technology more agile and dynamic.
It allows for non-blockchain orientated firm to contract out the development of their platform, rather than make their own in house. This mitigates a lot of risk and allows the companies to be further along in the process than if they were to start from scratch.
