Osmosis, a decentralized exchange (DEX) built on Cosmos, has emerged as the most actively developed decentralized finance (DeFi) project in the past month, based on data provided by crypto intelligence platform Santiment.
According to a post from Santiment on March 25, Osmosis recorded over 169 commits on GitHub in the last 30 days. The decentralized perpetuals exchange dYdX came in second with 145 commits, followed by derivatives liquidity protocol Synthetix with 116 commits.
Santiment explained that the “developer activity” list was compiled by aggregating all non-redundant GitHub activity from each project’s records and calculating the average number of those values.
Between early October and March 15, both the total value locked (TVL) and overall trading volumes on Osmosis experienced significant growth.
The increase in activity can largely be attributed to the growing interest in airdrop farming on Cosmos-related infrastructure within the broader crypto sector, with Osmosis serving as the primary DEX on Cosmos. Several projects, including data availability blockchain network Celestia and multilayer RollApp deployer Dymension, have utilized core elements of the Cosmos ecosystem and have distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in airdrops to farmers.
As for dYdX, much of its development activity can be attributed to the v4 upgrade implemented in early January. This network shift saw the decentralized derivatives exchange transition from an Ethereum layer-2 network to a standalone blockchain within the Cosmos ecosystem. Since its launch on January 25, the dYdX v4 network has generated over $60 billion in trading volume, according to DefiLlama data.
Meanwhile, the TVL on the Synthetix protocol has been steadily increasing since mid-February and currently stands at $994 million across the Ethereum and Optimism networks. In July 2023, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick announced the upcoming launch of a new derivatives front-end called Infinex. The alpha version of the platform is already live on the mainnet, with the full-release version expected in the coming months.