Some of our new users on CoinGecko find it hard to understand our Developer metrics. This blog post will hopefully help explain our Developer metrics clearly so you can make better use of the data on our website.

The backbone of any successful coin is the strength of the developer team. Without developers, there will not be any coin. Developers are there to create new features and fix any bugs that can diminish the utility of the coin network.

One of the key characteristics of Bitcoin is that the source code is open-source. Anyone, anywhere in the world can take the code and improve it. The code is available for all to see on Github. Github is a website which hosts source code repositories and enables easy collaboration and code management among all the developers.

All the other coins with the exception of NXT hosts their source code on Github. NXT hosts theirs on Bitbucket, a website similar to Github.

Using Github, there are several statistics that are publicly accessible. CoinGecko has made use of the Github API and Bitbucket API to parse data for each coin to give a gauge of the development activity for each coin.