Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Cardano is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson & Jeremy Wood and launched in 2017.

ADA holders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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Cardano

# Cardano Contract deployers Methodology

## 1. Overview

Contract deployers measures the number of unique addresses that have deployed at least one smart contract on Cardano. This metric serves as a proxy for the total number of independent developers or entities that actively publish code on-chain. Insight into the growth and health of the Cardano programmable ecosystem is provided by monitoring the volume of unique deployers over time.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Contract creation records from `contracts` ledger data, covering Cardano

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Extraction of contract deployments

- **Purpose**: Identify the unique entities responsible for initiating smart contract deployments.
- **Logic**: Contract creation records are retrieved from the ledger to identify new program deployments. For each record, the deployer address, contract address, and creation timestamp are extracted. Distinct combinations of these fields are maintained to ensure a clean dataset of unique deployment events.
- **Key fields**: `deployer_address` (identifier of the developer), `account_address` (identifier of the created contract), and `block_timestamp` (timing of deployment).

### Component B: Unique deployer aggregation

- **Purpose**: Calculate the daily count of independent developers publishing code.
- **Logic**: Deployer addresses are aggregated by day based on the transaction timestamp. A distinct count of deployer addresses is performed for each UTC day. This process ensures that if a single address deploys multiple contracts within the same day, it is only counted once for that period.

### Component C: Data standardization and finalization

- **Purpose**: Ensure the metric is consistent, continuous, and verified.
- **Logic**: Daily counts are cast to standardized numeric formats. A zero-filling strategy is applied to the time series to ensure that days with no deployment activity are represented with a value of zero rather than being omitted. Data is further refined by a chain availability filter, which restricts the output to include only verified data up to the last approved timestamp.

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Unique addresses that deployed at least one smart contract.

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Contract deployers

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