Chainlink leads DeFi development with a top score of 492.87, despite an 8.99% price dip, signaling strong investment in oracle infrastructure.
DeepBook Protocol ranks second with 264.83, showing growth in decentralized order book models on Sui, while its token faces a 13.69% drop.
Synthetix, Lido DAO, and Liquity hold strong in developer activity rankings, underlining resilience despite market-wide price declines.
Chainlink has emerged as the most actively developed DeFi project over the past 30 days, securing a top score of 492.87 in Santiment’s latest ranking. Despite this technical dominance, the token price has slipped 8.99% in a week, now trading at $14.15 with a $9.29 billion market cap.
DeFi Leaders Shift Focus as Code Contributions Surge
Chainlink leads a competitive field of decentralized finance projects tracked for on-chain development activity, according to a post by Santiment on X. Its position underscores ongoing investment in core infrastructure, particularly around data services and oracle networks on Ethereum. The project’s GitHub performance signals sustained contributor engagement despite broader market softening.
DeepBook Protocol trails closely in second with a development score of 264.83, reflecting momentum across decentralized order book models built on Sui Network. The token is priced at $0.0149073, representing a 13.69% weekly drop and a $469.73 million market valuation. DeFiChain follows in third with 221.77 in activity, trading at just $0.006516 after a 16% decline, with a micro-cap of $5.4 million and ecosystem initiatives focused on Bitcoin-native DeFi.
Santiment Explains Development Methodology to Refine Metrics
Santiment’s methodology for ranking more than 4,000 blockchain projects was recently clarified to address misleading commit counts and inflated contributions. According to Santiment’s reports on Medium, the Ecosystem Development Activity Dashboard excludes non-technical actions like comments, forks, and management logs. This filters only meaningful coding events, such as protocol upgrades, client updates, and smart contract deployments.
The model further distinguishes between raw GitHub activity and actionable development contributions. Projects that inherit code through forking do not receive artificial boosts under this system, enabling a fairer comparison. Ethereum continues to lead in base-level developer engagement, with ecosystems like BNB Chain and Polygon showing comparably lower thresholds during quieter phases.
Infrastructure and Protocol Layers Drive the Top 10 List
Synthetix, ranked fourth with a development score of 151.53, maintains its position as a leader in synthetic asset issuance on Ethereum. Its SNX token is priced at $0.689231 after a 9.03% dip, with a market cap of $236.72 million. Liquity, a decentralized borrowing platform, sits in fifth with 126.73 in activity; its token has dropped 12.63% to $0.738707, backed by a $70.12 million valuation.
Lido DAO ranks sixth at 116.17, with its LDO token rising 6.7% this week to $0.88647. Injective, focused on DeFi derivatives and cross-chain trading, holds seventh place with a 99 score. Its INJ token is trading at $13.02, down 8.3%, while Babylon and FOX Token close out the top 10, both registering double-digit growth activity despite weekly losses.
Developer Activity Remains a Key DeFi Valuation Metric
Coinbase’s Wrapped Bitcoin ranks ninth with a score of 79.6, trading at $63,703 with no standalone market rank due to its pegged nature. FOX Token holds the tenth position with 67.47 in development activity and a price of $0.0281178, down 5.74%. It carries a $27.11 million market cap and plays a role in community-led governance and DeFi liquidity pools.
Santiment’s realignment of metrics highlights how sustained code commits reflect deeper protocol resilience and future roadmap delivery. Amid price volatility across many of the top-ranked tokens, developer persistence is becoming a core factor in investor evaluations.
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