Deloitte Centre for Financial Services acknowledges that it can’t predict the exact trajectory and evolution of blockchain technology. But we also should not ignore its early stages of development and successes along with failures. Tracking this young technology’s development could potentially maximise its potential to best serve the public.

To assess and better understand the development of blockchain and its ecosystem, the authors have conducted an extensive data analysis of blockchain projects in an open-source environment.  The study appears to be the first empirical attempt to understand the evolution of blockchain using metadata available on GitHub, a global software collaboration platform.

The authors chose GitHub because it is the largest known software collaboration platform in the world, with more than 68 million projects and 24 million participants.  It also appears to host the most important projects for the blockchain community. The activity on GitHub provides a unique opportunity to identify who is behind blockchain’s development, what type of programming is powering it, where the talent resides, how networks and communities of projects and developers are organised, and what risk factors exist for investing resources into repositories. These are all key indicators of how the evolution of blockchain will occur.

This study of the evolution of blockchain indicates that financial services firms are involved in blockchain development on GitHub. There are essentially two types
of participators on GitHub: the committer and the watcher. The committer makes commits, or contributions to code, while the watcher follows the development of a project without making code contributions. This will help to ensure the ecosystem continues to grow and benefit multiple users.