Analyzing the Relationship Between Project Success and Project Type for Open Source, Decentralized Finance and Web 3.0 Projects

Abstract

Decentralized applications and services are crucial to the crypto industry. This study examines the development history of over 600 open source crypto projects using GitHub Archive data from 2013 to 2023. By leveraging SQL scripts, this project extracted various project activities—such as watches, pull requests, pushes, commits, and branch creations—to build a comprehensive history for each project. Projects were categorized into types like crypto wallets, Dapps, L2 networks, tokens, and stablecoins to identify trends in GitHub activity by project type. They were also distinguished by their funding and governance models. Our hypothesis suggests that different project types may exhibit distinct activity patterns, such as Dapps having more commits or token projects having more branches.  Additionally, our research focuses on the correlation between a project's governance and funding model and its success, measured by the level of user development and interaction on GitHub. It is hypothesized that more successful projects show higher and sustained activity levels. This analysis aims to determine if certain funding and governance models models, such as those of DAOs versus private companies, reliably correlate with project success, or if external factors play a larger role. The findings offer insights into the governance of decentralized corporations and the impact of business models on project success, enhancing our understanding of the factors driving development and engagement in the crypto and OSS communities.

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.