Osmosis, a decentralized exchange built on Cosmos, has surged to become the most actively developed decentralized finance (DeFi) project in the last month, according to data shared by crypto intelligence platform Santiment. 

In a March 25 post to X, Santiment wrote that Osmosis had seen over 169 commits on GitHub in the last 30 days. The decentralized perpetuals exchange dydX stood in second place, with 145 commits, while derivatives liquidity protocol Synthetix came in third with 116.

Santiment explained the list of “developer activity” was collected by compiling all non-redundant GitHub activity listed on each project’s respective records and providing an average number of those values.

The total value-locked and overall trading volumes on Osmosis saw a significant increase between early October and March 15.

Much of the uptick in activity can be traced back to a surge of interest in airdrop farming on Cosmos-related infrastructure throughout the wider crypto sector — with Osmosis being the primary DEX on Cosmos.

Several projects such as data availability blockchain network Celestia (TIA) and multilayer RollApp deployer Dymension (DYM) use core elements of the Cosmos ecosystem for their networks and have now yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in airdrops for farmers.

Related: Cosmos-based networks Umee and Osmosis to merge, creating ‘DeFi Hub’

For dydx, much of the development activity could be linked to its early-January v4 upgrade — a network shift that saw the decentralized derivatives exchange transition from an Ethereum layer-2 network to a standalone blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem.

The dydx V4 network has generated more than $60 billion worth of trading volume since going live on Jan. 25, per DefiLlama data.

Meanwhile, the TVL on the Synthetix protocol has also been steadily increasing since mid-February and currently stands at $994 million across the Ethereum and Optimism networks.

In July 2023, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick announced the upcoming launch of a new derivatives front-end called Infinex. The Alpha version of the platform is live on mainnet with the full-release version currently slated for full release in the coming months.

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