Ecosystem reports

Octant recently kicked off Epoch 3, its latest reward allocation round, featuring 30 projects. This round comes three months after Epoch 2, which had a total of 24 projects in it. There are 20 projects continuing on from Epoch 2 into Epoch 3 - including Open Source Observer.

During Epoch 2, we published a blog post with some high-level indicators about the 20+ open source software (OSS) projects participating in the round. In this post, we'll provide some insights about the new OSS projects and refresh our analysis for the returning projects.

Overall, in Epoch 3, Octant is helping support:

• 26 (out of 30) projects with at least some recent OSS component to their work
• 343 GitHub repos with regular activity
• 651 developers making regular code commits or reviews

In the last 6 months, these 26 projects:

• Attracted 881 first-time contributors
• Closed over 4,646 issues (and created 4,856 new ones)
• Merged over 9,745 pull requests (and opened 11,534 new ones)

In our last post, we provided a snapshot on the open source software projects building on Arbitrum. In this post, we will apply a series of experimental impact metrics to identify positive growth and network contribution trends across a cohort of more than 300 major projects on Arbitrum.

We believe impact metrics such as these are instrumental in helping the Arbitrum DAO better design incentives and allocate capital across its ecosystem. The metrics we've included are all derived from both onchain and off-chain project data. They include well-established crypto indicators like active users, sequencer fees, and transaction counts as well as common OSS metrics like full-time active developers, issues closed, and new contributors.

The real value, however, lies in combining simple metrics in novel ways to filter and benchmark projects' contributions. We introduce four "impact pools" that can assist with this type of analysis. The pools are:

• Sustainable user growth: projects that not only bring large numbers of active users to the network but also retain and connect them easily to other dapps
• Developer growth: projects with the most developer activity and new contributors to its GitHub repos in recent months
• Blockspace demand: projects with the most transactions and sequencer fee contributions
• Momentum: projects with a mix of positive developer and onchain user trends

Gitcoin has been providing grants to open source software teams since 2019.

Over the last four years, more than $38M has been distributed via quadratic funding across 3,000+ projects and over 18,000 project applications. This includes both $22M in matching funds and $16M in direct donations from the community. On average, for every $1.00 put up by a matching fund donor, they have raised an additional $0.75 from the community.

(Overall, Gitcoin has allocated more than $50M towards public goods through a range of mechanisms, including direct donations and bounties, as well as quadratic funding.)

Although there are often anecdotal reports about Gitcoin's impact from projects, there have been few attempts to look longitudinally across a cohort of projects and track their impact over multiple years.

In this piece, we identify a group of 50 open source software projects that have received significant funding across multiple Gitcoin Grants rounds and then we examine the relationship between grants and growth.

Within this cohort, we see that for every $1M that has been paid out in grants since 2019, there are 7 full-time developers who are still around today. If we factor in the crowdfund multiplier, then every $1M put into the matching pool is associated with 13 retained full-time developers. These results have held up even during the bear market.

We are excited to present our inaugural report on the state of open source software (OSS) projects building on Arbitrum. This analysis is the first in a series aimed at providing the community with data and insights to assist with impact measurement and grantmaking.

Some highlights:

1. We are currently tracking over 300 OSS projects and over 13,000 code artifacts that are making an impact on the Arbitrum ecosystem. These artifacts include both GitHub repos (~10,000) and smart contracts deployed on Arbitrum One (~3,000).
2. Approximately 1,800 developers are actively engaged in these projects. This number aligns closely with the latest Electric Capital Developer Report. Our analysis, however, incorporates an additional 94 projects not currently captured in their registry.
3. The number of active developers is 18% lower than the peak of around 2,200 in March 2023. It's important to note, however, that this reduction is primarily concentrated in a few projects rather than a general decline across the ecosystem. In fact, the majority of projects have maintained a stable developer count over the past year.

Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We are one of the 24 projects in Octant's Epoch 2 funding allocation.

We used our dataset to take a quick snapshot of the collective impact of Octant's funding on the OSS developer community. In Epoch 2, Octant is helping support:

• 23 projects with at least some OSS component to their work
• 322 GitHub repos with regular activity
• 542 developers making regular code commits or reviews

In the last 6 months, these 23 projects:

• Attracted 556 first-time contributors
• Closed over 5,608 issues (and created 5,962 new ones)
• Merged over 10,817 pull requests (and opened 12,443)

Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We launched a few months ago with a commitment to open source everything. We attended the PL Summit in Istanbul last month and had a chance to present our work to the community.

We are excited to announce that we are now initiating coverage of the PLN open source economy!

Heatmap of all GitHub contributions to PLN open source projects since 2017.

This report is a shallow dive on 188 open source software projects that we are currently tracking within the PLN ecosystem. We are also tracking 1,000+ projects in the broader crypto economy, which we will cover in seperate reports.

Open Source Observer is a platform for measuring the impact of open source software (OSS) contributions. We launched a few months ago with a commitment to open source everything. Here is our hello world post on the forum ICYMI.

This report is a shallow dive on the 300+ open source software projects participating in the latest round of retroactive public goods funding (RetroPGF 3). It combines both off- and onchain data about projects.

The report itself has two objectives:

• Kickstart more rigorous analysis on the effectiveness of RetroPGF as a mechanism
• Snipe some data nerds to join our data collective

Let’s jump in.