Distributions of Funding Models, Application Types, and Governance Models in Blockchain OSS Projects (2013 - 2024)

Abstract

Blockchain technology has only recently caught the attention of developers and tech entrepreneurs around the world; its own history dates back about 15 years, with the birth of Bitcoin in 2009. As the field evolved, modern Open-Source Software (OSS) projects within the blockchain field have diversified across various application types, funding strategies, and governance models. Despite this growth, comprehensive data on the distributions of these characteristics remains scarce due to the field's relative youth. This study addresses this gap by running Structured Query Language (SQL) scripts within Google Cloud's BigQuery API to retrieve GitHub development data between 2013 and 2024 from 660 OSS organizations. Next, using Excel, we generated distributions of the three attributes mentioned above and found that 62.5% of the OSS organizations rely on Public Token or Product/Service Sales for funding; 31.4% were Decentralized Apps, leading the other application types by a margin of over 15%; and 45.2% were Private Companies. Additionally, 22.9% of these projects were not centrally organized, remaining in the early, pre-seed stage, thus reflecting the developing nature of the field. These findings reveal prevalent characteristics and trends of OSS projects within the blockchain field, which can guide future investment and development strategies.

This abstract is part of a collection in which the overarching large project under Dr. Jiasun Li was subdivided into discrete critical tasks that were carried out by multiple individuals or smaller teams. Abstracts in this collection read similarly given the shared project goals, but represent distinct tasks completed by the abstract authors towards finalizing the described analysis.