Investigating Governance of Decentralized Projects Through GitHub Archive

Abstract

Decentralized applications and services are of great importance to the crypto industry. Our work looks at over 200 such companies in our study and investigates the development history for each on Github Archive with the goal of finding patterns in the data to reveal more about the governance of decentralized corporations. The Github data for each company was pulled using a SQL script to obtain various details about the project activity from 2013 to 2023. These details include the number of watches, pull requests, pushes, commits, branch creations, and more which altogether create a picture of the project’s history. Next, our team researched each company to find what type of project the company was. For example, it could be a crypto wallet, a Dapp, a L2 network, or a token or stablecoin. We are looking to find trends between Github activities and the type of project. For instance, we look to see if Dapps have more commits on average than an L2 network, or if a characteristic of a token project turns out that they usually have many branches. The hypothesis that different projects could have different Github activity frequencies is still in the process of being tested. 

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.