Crypto projects complexity comparison

This project is a follow-up to this Ethereum development lead tweet

which states that the complexity of Ethereum never decreased and that this might be a worrying trend.

This project tries to:

• Quantify the complexity as lines of code of given project over time
• Compare the biggest crypto projects and see if there are any trends

Result

Year	BTC		ETH
	LOC	% change y/y	LOC	% change y/y
2010	28,460
2011	33,492	18%
2012	21,196	-37%
2013	39,631	87%
2014	47,685	20%
2015	66,327	39%	37,244
2016	75,917	14%	78,685	111%
2017	85,976	13%	115,449	47%
2018	94,448	10%	200,680	74%
2019	105,534	12%	237,222	18%
2020	111,615	6%	237,222	0%
2021	122,082	9%	391,998	65%
2022	138,063	13%	417,000	6%
AVG		17%		46%

• Raw data available in ./result/res.json
• Or you can generate the json, png or csv yourself by running some of the commands in the Run docs section

Analysis method

1. Gather repositories of crypto projects (some can have more than one).
2. Find the date of the first and last commit in the given repository.
3. Generate a range of dates with 1-month increments rounded to the start of the month (2020-01-01, 2020-02-01, 2020-03-01, ..).
   • This Range starts on the first day of the whole month after the first commit and ends on the first day of the month of the last commit (2010-05-10 — 2020-10-20 -> 2010-06-01 — 2020-10-01).
4. For each item in this range we find commit at the same date or closest one before the date.
5. For each of these commit we check out the repository and run cloc binary to determine lines of code in the project at that time.
   • We try to filter:
     • Test code.
     • Benchmark code.
     • Non-core source code files (Markdown, JSON, HTML, translations, ...).
     • Committed external dependencies in the project.

Notes to certain projects

• Bitcoin
  • Filtered out UI code in src/qt.
• Ethereum
  • go-ethereum seems to be using 2 submodules and we are not cloning/initializing these nested submodules (we do not do git submodule --recursive), so they are not included in the analysis. These submodules seem to only be testing-related, so it is probably correct that they are not included.
  • We include solidity in the analysis since it seems to be a core part of the project.
  • Ethereum used to commit external Go vender/dependencies into the project in the /Godeps and later in the /vendor folders, these are filtered out (with them, the LOC are about 2.5x bigger).

Run

Prerequisites

• Node.js and NPM is required

Install

• Init git submodules git submodule update --init
• Install Node dependencies npm install

Start

• Analyze repositories
  • Run git submodule update --remote --merge to update the submodules
  • Run npm run start
  • Generates result/res.json
• Show chart
  • Run npm run chart
  • Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/chart
    • Click the chart settings button for csv or png export