Impact pools on Arbitrum: identifying projects that are driving ecosystem growth
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