We analyze developer activity across 10 major Ethereum repositories (totaling 129884 commits, 40550 issues) spanning 10 years to examine how events such as technical upgrades, market events, and community decisions impact development. Through statistical, survival, and network analyses, we find that technical events prompt increased activity before the event, followed by reduced commit rates afterwards, whereas market events lead to more reactive development. Core infrastructure repositories like Go-Ethereum exhibit faster issue resolution compared to developer tools, and technical events enhance core team collaboration. Our findings show how different types of events shape development dynamics, offering insights for project managers and developers in maintaining development momentum through major transitions. This work contributes to understanding the resilience of development communities and their adaptation to ecosystem changes.
Year
2025
URL
Abstract
Summary
We look at 10 years of developer activity across 10 major Ethereum repositories (around 130,000 commits, 40,000 issues) to see how technical upgrades, market events and community decisions affect development. Technical events tend to prompt a burst of activity beforehand followed by a lull afterwards, while market events provoke more reactive development. Core infrastructure repositories like Go-Ethereum resolve issues faster than developer tools, and technical events strengthen collaboration within the core team. The findings offer practical insight for maintaining development momentum through major transitions, and for understanding how open-source communities adapt to ecosystem change.
bibtex
@inproceedings{vaccargiu2025ethereum,
author = {Matteo Vaccargiu and Sabrina Aufiero and Cheick Tidiane Ba and Silvia Bartolucci and Richard G. Clegg and Daniel Graziotin and Rumyana Neykova and Roberto Tonelli and Giuseppe Destefanis},
title = {Mining a Decade of Event Impacts on Contributor Dynamics in Ethereum: A Longitudinal Study},
booktitle = {IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1109/MSR66628.2025.00088}
}
author = {Matteo Vaccargiu and Sabrina Aufiero and Cheick Tidiane Ba and Silvia Bartolucci and Richard G. Clegg and Daniel Graziotin and Rumyana Neykova and Roberto Tonelli and Giuseppe Destefanis},
title = {Mining a Decade of Event Impacts on Contributor Dynamics in Ethereum: A Longitudinal Study},
booktitle = {IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1109/MSR66628.2025.00088}
}
Venue
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)