Santiment’s May 2026 report ranks Chainlink, DeepBook, and Lido DAO as the top three DeFi projects by development activity, measured by meaningful GitHub events over the previous month. Chainlink reclaimed the top spot, with DeepBook close behind in second and Lido DAO climbing to third.
What Santiment is actually measuring
Santiment’s methodology filters out noise. The analytics platform focuses on notable GitHub events while excluding low-value actions like forks and minor commits that can artificially inflate activity numbers.
Chainlink and DeepBook have appeared at the top of Santiment’s development activity reports repeatedly since 2025. That’s sustained engineering investment over more than a year.
The three pillars: oracles, liquidity, and staking
