According to a GitHub report, Ethereum is of the fastest growing open source projects on their platform. Specifically, Go Ethereum was the 5th fastest on GitHub in 2018. Here’s what developers around the world have been working on.

Keep in mind that GitHub is referring to the protocol, not Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC), which are cryptocurrencies.

GitHub’s Fastest Growing Open Source Project

GitHub, the leading online platform for software development, just released a report detailing the activity over the past year.

The report stated that an Ethereum project, named Go Ethereum, was one of their fastest-growing open source projects. It saw a double growth compared to 2017.

A Blockchain for Smart Contracts and Dapps

It’s currently the most popular platform for developing smart contracts and dApps, or decentralized applications. Not only is Ethereum a crypto that you can buy on Coinbase, but it’s a platform.

Specifically, it provides a framework for other blockchain-based projects. Currently, the platform is preparing to undergo a series of updates at the end of October. The updates are collectively known as Constantinople and include five Ethereum Improvement Proposals or EIPs.

What is Go Ethereum?

The GitHub project Go Ethereum refers to the protocol’s implementation using Go programming language. Go is one of the three original implementations. The other two use Python and C++ languages. Another language used for Ethereum is Solidity. Solidity is the main programming language for writing smart contracts.

Go is a programming language that was developed by three Google engineers to provide higher productivity and resolve some of the criticisms from other languages. Therefore, it is efficient, easy to use and allows high-performance networking and the use of more than one central processing unit (CPU) within a single computer system.

Go Ethereum, also known as Geth

Go Ethereum is also affectionately dubbed “Geth.” The name comes from the popular Mass Effect video game. In the game, Geth is a race of networked AI, which became sentient. Under threat of extermination from their creators, the Quarians, Geth manages to win a war against them. In this way, Geth’s history represents a warning for other civilizations that create and repress AI.

Moreover, Geth is also the name of the main command-line interface. A command-line interface allows the user to interact with a computing program through issuing commands via successive lines of text. In this way, Geth represents the main entry point into the network. This makes it attractive to GitHub developers.

GitHub’s Fastest Growing Projects

In 2018, Ethereum was GitHub’s 5th fastest growing open-source project. Which projects were even more popular with developers?

One name that dominated GitHub’s report was Microsoft. Microsoft’s Visual Studio(VS) Code was the top open source project with 19,000 contributors over the past year. VS Code is an editor for writing computing program source codes.  Moreover, the documentation for Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform was the fifth most popular project overall with 7,800 contributors.

Keep in mind that Microsoft just bought GitHub for $7.5 billion.

The Azure Documentation project was the fastest-growing, registering a growth more than 4.7 times that of 2017. Moreover, Microsoft had 7,700 employees that contributed to GitHub, the largest number among any organizations.

Furthermore, other top projects on GitHub in 2017 were Facebook React Native. React Native allows building Facebook Applications. It had 10,000 contributors. On the third spot was TensorFlow, with 9,300 contributors. TensorFlow is an open-source software library for machine learning applications.

All in all, open-source and large-scale corporate blockchain innovation is booming. For example, IBM and Australia created a national blockchain.