Bitcoin Fundamentals in the Form of New Research and Development Can Help BTC’s Next Bull Run

Bitcoin (BTC), the most popular digital asset, could start to experience a new bull market. The virtual currency has been in a bear trend since December 2017 and it might keep falling even further in the near future. However, with a larger investment in research and development, it may be possible for the digital asset to start growing once again.

Bitcoin Could Grow Due To R&D Investment

The cryptocurrency community is very active and tends to work on improving the Bitcoin network. According to a recent study released by Electric Capital, the number of developers that are currently working on public blockchains doubled since 2017.

As per this report, there were 2,190 developers working in different public projects in the space. However, the number of monthly active developers moved to 4,352 by the end of January 2019. The underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies is being developed even during such a long and hard bear market.

Avichal Grag, the co-founder of Electric Capital, commented about the crypto market and its development:

“The number of monthly active developers fell 4 percent while the markets fell more than 80 percent. Developers who entered the crypto ecosystem have continued to build despite market conditions.”

However, not all coins are being equally developed. There are some teams that are more active than others. Avichal Gal mentioned that the most active project in the market was Ehereum, who attracted the biggest developer team. As per the report, they averaged 99 participants every single month that are building the protocol. Bitcoin had an average of 47 developers each month.

6/ If you consider TOTAL code developers (protocol + wallets, docs, APIs, etc…), @Ethereum still has the most developers. More than 200 developers/month are working on Ethereum.

Reminder: this is an undercount as it doesn’t include ecosystem devs like those working on @Truffle. pic.twitter.com/OLwuSTdD3i

— Avichal Garg (Electric Capital) ⚡ (@avichal) March 7, 2019

Grag mentioned that Bitcoin did not have less than 35 developers working in the past year. That means that the development of the virtual currency is in “top health.” He has also added that development activity on some platforms such as Litecoin (LTC) or EOS, was dead or close to nothing. Both EOS and Litecoin are the fourth and fifth digital assets in terms of market capitalization, respectively.

The more the activity in a network, the better the results for the price of this specific digital asset. According to a recent report released by Sha Wang and Jean-Philippe Vergne, an increase in crypto development activity by a standard deviation was related to weekly gains of 9%.

Bitcoin and other digital assets do not have a centralized authority that controls how the virtual currency works. Thus, these projects heavily rely on the work that their communities do. Voluntary participation becomes a key thing during a bear market.

Developers working on different projects submit their proposals to the Bitcoin GitHub repository, they become commits. These commits have a maximum number of votes and get integrated to Bitcoin. Authors and developers of these commits receive a bounty in the form of tokens and crypto coins.

If there is high voluntary participation in these projects this shows that there is a growing interest in virtual currencies, which should be considered bullish for the current state of the market.

At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin is being traded around $3920 and it has a market capitalization of almost $69 billion.