Sleeper ICO-era project becomes 3rd most actively developed crypto app

A decentralized messaging app has soared into the top three most actively-developed crypto projects of the last month.

An almost-forgotten crypto “communication” app born during the initial coin offering (ICO) boom has n surged to become one of the most actively developed projects in the crypto ecosystem. 

According to a March 21 post from crypto intelligence platform Santiment, a dormant Ethereum-based project called Status — an open-source crypto messaging app — now stands as the third-most actively developed project over the last thirty days.

Santiment shared that Status had seen over 434 GitHub commits in the past month, ten less than Cardano (ADA) and 17 less than the most actively developed project, Chainlink (LINK).

The still unreleased communication app positions itself as a competitor to Discord and Telegram, touting community-oriented features and claims to allow users to send crypto to each other via its platform.

While most other encrypted messaging apps require phone numbers to sign up, Status allows users to sign up to the platform using crypto wallet addresses.

However, Status has been at least six years in the making, as it first launched during the initial coin offering (ICO) boom in July 2017, raising a staggering $100 million for its native SNT token in less than 24 hours.

The project garnered later criticism for being slow to bring a working product to market.

In April 2020, the project’s leadership, CEO Jarrad Hope and chief communications officer, Carl Bennetts, were named as individual defendants in a class-action lawsuit — which declared the sale of the SNT token as being an unregistered securities offering.

Fast forward to Nov. 8, 2023, however, and the project has announced the launch of upcoming alpha and beta versions of its app over the coming months.

In a Nov. 8 blog post, Status addressed some of the community’s concerns with its development — saying that its initial vision of creating a consumer-facing super app had “proved overly optimistic.”

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Status cited several reasons for development hiccups, including scalability challenges that saw it abandon its “Whisper” protocol, as well as being forced to lay off staff during the 2018 crypto market crash.

However, the resurgence of development activity and an uptick in crypto prices beginning in late 2022 saw the firm regain its footing.

“The 2022 bull market endowed us with the financial wherewithal needed to execute Status’ updated strategy, so the next step was to scale the org back up to the resource level required to realize our ambitious vision,” wrote the Status team.

The project’s native SNT token is currently changing hands for $0.04, up 2.4% in the last 24 hours and roughly 50% over the last year. SNT remains down 93.4% from its all-time high of $0.68, which it notched on Jan. 3, 2018, per CoinGecko data.