Osmosis, a decentralized exchange (DEX) built on Cosmos, has emerged as the most actively developed decentralized finance (DeFi) project in recent weeks, according to data from Santiment, a crypto intelligence platform.
In a post on March 25, Santiment revealed that Osmosis had received over 169 commits on GitHub in the past 30 days, surpassing other projects in the space. The decentralized perpetuals exchange dYdX came in second with 145 commits, followed by the derivatives liquidity protocol Synthetix with 116.
Santiment explained that the ranking of “developer activity” was determined by compiling all unique GitHub activity from each project’s records and calculating an average based on those values.
The total value locked (TVL) and trading volumes on Osmosis have experienced significant growth between early October and March 15.
This surge in activity can be attributed to the increasing interest in airdrop farming on Cosmos-related infrastructure across the wider crypto industry, with Osmosis being the primary DEX on the Cosmos network. Projects such as Celestia, a data availability blockchain network, and Dymension, a multilayer RollApp deployer, have leveraged the Cosmos ecosystem to distribute millions of dollars in airdrops to farmers.
As for dYdX, much of its recent development activity can be linked to its v4 upgrade 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 facilitated over $60 billion worth of trading volume, according to DefiLlama data.
The TVL on the Synthetix protocol has also 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.