IOTA at number 1 in the crypto ranking: +720% growth in development activity
- IOTA leads all crypto projects with +720% dev activity growth at Chain Broker.
- Absolutely, IOTA is in the middle of the field at Santiment; At the same time, Testnet v1.14.0 will be released with a focus on maintenance and developer tools.
A new ranking from Chain Broker on “Development Activity Growth” puts IOTA at the top again at the beginning of January. In the overview published on January 7, 2026, the project tops the list of the ten strongest risers in the last 30 days with a growth in development activity of +720 percent. Remarkably, IOTA had already topped the ranking in December.
IOTA leads developer activity growth
Chain Broker summarized the finding in one Post on In addition to the percentage change, the graphic also shows an activity value.
In the January update, Chain Broker reports the highest activity levels at Midnight (77.5) and Cartesi (66.2). This is followed by zkSync (61.3) and Arbitrum (53.0). ShapeShift comes in at 43.7, IOTA at 39.2 and Aragon at 27.3. At the bottom of the group are Celo (23.7), Qubic (16.7) and Concordium (14.2).
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However, a comparison with Santiment’s “Dev Activity” dashboard paints a more differentiated picture because the focus there is not on the growth rate, but on the absolute activity level. According to the dashboard, IOTA only ranks 27th, with 14,700 “DevActivity Events”. The number of “DevActivity Event Contributors”, which is 50, is also interesting.
The fact that IOTA only ends up in 27th place can also be explained by the size of the ecosystems and the absolute number of developers (“contributors”). This is also why Ethereum is in first place: The dashboard shows 453,300 “DevActivity Events” for Ethereum, supported by around 1,300 “DevActivity Event Contributors”.
This is followed by BNB Chain with 209,900 events and 734 contributors and Polygon with 174,400 events and 547 contributors. Arbitrum ranks at number 4 with 148,800 events and 455 contributors, just ahead of Optimism at number 5 with 146,200 events and 433 contributors.
This comparison shows why a percentage growth signal, as in the Chain Broker graphic, does not automatically mean that an ecosystem has already reached the top group of the largest development centers in absolute terms. Nevertheless, it is a strong signal of growth.
IOTA releases testnet v1.14.0
In keeping with its renewed top spot in Chain Broker’s growth evaluation, the IOTA Foundation has reached a new development milestone with the testnet release v1.14.0.
The testnet pre-release v1.14.0-rc is not a “hard upgrade” in the sense of new network rules: According to the release notes, the protocol version remains unchanged (still version 17). Instead, the focus is on better maintenance and faster operational troubleshooting.
— what.iota (@whatmicha) January 7, 2026
Specifically, IOTA is expanding the telemetry of the nodes: Validators and full nodes now provide additional performance data that can be output as Grafana flamegraphs, among other things, including SVG representation and additional metrics for resource consumption per thread. For teams that operate nodes, this should make bottlenecks and noticeable load peaks more quickly visible.
On the developer side, GraphQL and CLI have also been improved. GraphQL resolves move abort errors more reliably and offers a new query to digest multiple transactions in batches. At the same time, a GraphQL filter is renamed (signAddress to sentAddress) and the old path is only gradually deactivated over several months; A bug in the CLI was fixed that caused upgrades to end prematurely under certain version constellations.
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