Solana has issued advice to correctly measure user and developer activity and growth on its platform.
To identify the chain’s performance, it is important to understand the developer and ecosystem growth on Solana, the company states. However, doing these measurements can be cumbersome. Tracking activity on Solana greatly differs from the majority of blockchains available.
To track users on-chain in an effective manner requires a robust approach. This is needed because blockchain are transparent, open and make user data public. Instead of assuming that one address goes to one user and become prone to sybil attacks, Solana suggests otherwise. With feePayer, Solana can find out what address is paying transaction fees. Each transaction displays various addresses, and the first one that is listed is the feePayer. This is what Solana uses as a proxy for the amount of active non-custodial wallets. The term ‘proxy’ is used because users can resort to paying fees via a centralized fee payer (wallet provider). According to Solana, the best way to measure dedicated users is represented by feePayer.
Solana used unique feePayers to determine that earlier in 2022, users peaked at 2.7 million. Monthly users decreased since then to levels similar to those before the peak.
A great way of understanding the growth of a chain is finding out how many developers are active. To track them, there first has to be a clear understanding of what libraries developers currently use. The Solana Foundation uses Github’s API to track these libraries. Solana also provides the Github queries necessary to obtain Solana-related repositories which are based on what libraries are used by devs.
Repositories can provide the necessary data showing each day’s coders. This data can be used to determine retention, trends, and other metrics. Solana reports that, in November 2022, it had 2053 active devs working on projects based on Solana and, of those, 1654 worked on Solana-focused projects.
