The Top Layer 2 Networks by Development Activity in April

While the cryptocurrency market witnessed significant bloodshed in April, layer 2 networks recorded significant developer activity, indicating strong faith in these projects despite the recent decline in the value of their native tokens.

a tweet Cryptocurrency data analytics platform Santiment revealed that the top ten Layer 2 networks were selected by calculating each project's non-redundant GitHub activity and averaging their daily activity over the past 30 days.

According to Santiment, analysts sourced projects' GitHub activities from their repositories through a back-tested process to ensure only teams' efforts to improve and innovate were included. A project's GitHub activity can be used to determine if the team is actively working on the protocol. High developer activity can also reduce the likelihood of a project being an exit scam.

Through Santiment's methodology, analysts discovered that the Ethereum Optimism-based scaling protocol emerged as the top network with the highest developer activity of 541.33 commits, 146% more than the next project. Conversely, its native token, OP, has fallen more than 17% in the last 30 days.

Following the optimism comes the decentralized, permissionless knowledge-gathering network Starknet, which recorded developer activity of 220.23. Despite Starknet's high activity, its native token, STRK, lost nearly 36% of its value in April.

Arbitrum came in third place with development activity of 110.77, while its original asset ARB fell by 32% during the same period. Next are the benchmarking protocol Cartesi, Immutable Their domestic assets also saw notable declines, reaching double digits.

The last four projects on the list are Bitcoin's layer 2 MintLayer, the Ethereum-based networks Polygon, MetisDAO, and Mantle, with developer activities of 23.53, 20.43, 7.87, and 5.33. Like other projects, the native token also recorded significant losses in April.