When I started my blockchain journey I was shocked to find as many as 21 platforms for developing blockchain applications on some article I read on the web. That immediately sent my head spinning. What platform should I choose to develop my application? Perhaps you are struggling with this question as well.

I was drawn to Fabric because it was built for the enterprise from the ground-up, supported writing chaincode (also known as smart contracts) in Javascript,
boasted high throughput in comparison to Ethereum verified by independent tests, had good enterprise footprint thanks to work of IBM with Merck, Walmart etc.,
did not require a cryptocurrency to function, and was backed by Linux Foundation which is a trusted name in computing and open-source. However by no means take this as an endorsement of Fabric as I have found the developer experience to be very unsatisfactory.

In the age of clever marketing where every blockchain platform appears to offer the best in class, performance, features etc. I think perhaps the most important criteria should be the footprint of the platform i.e., how many businesses and users are using it. Sadly I don’t know of a website that tracks the “market share” of permissioned blockchain platforms similar to sites that track market share of web browsers for example. That is understandable. It is very difficult to know how many businesses are using a certain platform.

But not all is lost. The question count on StackOverflow can be used as a proxy for market share. After all, the more a platform is used, the more there will be buzz about it, the more questions will get asked on StackOverflow. The hypothesis is validated by looking at the question count of programming languages. Javascript, Java and C# are some of the most popular languages and also have the highest question count on SO.

So let’s see where the platforms land in terms of the question count on SO. Very luckily SO provides a web based query engine that can be used for data mining and this answer on SO gave me exactly what I needed. Here is the adapted query for our case:

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1097536/question-count-or-score-growth-over-time-by-tag-comparison?ShowScore=0&Tag1=hyperledger-fabric&Tag2=quorum&Tag3=bigchaindb&Tag4=corda&Tag5=hyperledger-sawtooth&Tag6=tendermint#graph

And the results are…

Fabric is the winner! Here is a book I have written on Programming Hyperledger Fabric.