Overview
Santiment Cardano Developer Activity is a chart that shows how much coding work happens in the public code Santiment links to Cardano (ADA), plotted next to the ADA price. It suits investors, researchers, and community members who want a quick read on whether the teams behind a project are still building. Santiment's development numbers come from counting actions on GitHub, a website where developers store and share code, rather than counting commits, which are saved batches of code changes1. The chart's line adds that count to the number of unique contributors2.
The chart is a saved layout in Sanbase, the analytics app from Santiment, a company that offers on-chain (recorded on the blockchain), social, and development data for thousands of crypto assets3. Opening the link loads the Cardano (ADA) view with the development series already added, so there is nothing to set up2. Santiment explains how the metric works on its Santiment Academy site.
Key Features
- A count that forks do not inflate. When someone forks a project, meaning they make their own copy of its code, they inherit the original project's commit history; Santiment counts GitHub events instead, and a copy inherits none of them; forking creates only a single fork event1, and the Development Activity metric leaves that out4.
- Focus on coding work. The Development Activity metric leaves out comments on issues (bug reports and feature requests), new forks, and people watching a repository (a project's code and its change history). That lets projects that plan in GitHub be compared fairly with projects that plan in tools like Notion4.
- Optional bot filter. A second version of the metric drops activity from bot accounts and from personal accounts that behave like automation, such as an account with development events in 20 or more hours of one day5.
- Price and development on one screen. The Santiment chart shows the ADA price and the development series on the same timeline, with buttons to watch the asset, add an alert, and share the layout2.
- Same numbers for builders. Developers can pull development activity data through the Santiment API, a way for programs to request data directly, for crypto assets and for any GitHub organization with public repositories1.
What to Expect
Clicking the link opens the Sanbase chart screen with Cardano selected. The ADA price, market value, and rank sit at the top, and a sidebar lists the other metrics you can add, grouped under headings such as Development2. The chart's development line, labelled dev activity, is a custom series that adds Santiment's Development Activity count to its count of unique contributors. Log in and Sign up links appear at the top of the page for people who want an account.
Santiment's view is that developer time is expensive, so high activity suggests a team that is serious about its product and likely to keep shipping features1. The count only covers public GitHub repositories. Work in private repositories or on other code-hosting sites does not show up, and making a private repository public does not add its earlier history1. A quiet stretch on the chart can mean work is happening out of public view.
Readers who want the mechanics can open each metric's page on Santiment Academy, which lists which GitHub events count4 and how the bot filter decides what to remove5. The development metrics are free on every Sanbase plan5.
For developers, the Santiment API uses GraphQL, a query language that lets you ask for exactly the fields you need and nothing more6. The code for the server behind Sanbase is public on GitHub, so anyone can read it7. Other ways to track coding activity across the ecosystem sit in the development metrics category.
