The smart contract platform Cardano ($ADA) has maintained its third place when it comes to cryptocurrency networks in terms of development activity, behind the “blockchain of blockchains” Polkadot ($DOT) and its public pre-production environment Kusama ($KSM).

That’s according to data from on-chain analytics firm Santiment, which details Polkadot has managed to maintain its position as the leading cryptocurrency in terms of development activity, with Kusama and Cardano making the top three.

The term “development activity” refers to the amount of work completed by a cryptocurrency project’s developers on the project’s public GitHub repositories within the past 30 days.

Unlike other measures, Santiment’s metric focuses on “events” rather than the total number of commits. Events encompass various actions taken on GitHub repositories, such as pushing a commit, forking a repository, or creating an issue.

This approach provides a more accurate representation of the developers’ actual work, as it prevents duplication or inaccuracies that may occur when measuring development activity solely by commits.

For instance, forking creates a duplicate copy of a repository, including all previous commits. By counting the forking action as a single event, Santiment avoids falsely attributing older commits to new developers.

Notably, earlier this month data revealed tht despite Cardano’s “suppressed market value compared to its April local top,” utility is playing an important role in the rise of its on-chain transaction volume growth, and is being paired with “adequate ADA social dominance.”

The data showed that Cardano’s on-chain transaction volume had been steadily rising so far this year, to the point ADA’s weekly on-chain transaction volume has surged over 1,700% since late January.

Notably, last month Cardano whale wallets with a balance of 100,000 or more ADA have reached a 16-month high of 25,294, even as the cryptocurrency’s price dropped 35% from this year’s high to then trade at $0.28. It’s now trading even low at $0.25.

Featured image via Unsplash.