Written by Electric Capital
Compilation: The Way of DeFi
Original title: "Electric Capital Developer Report: Major public chain ecosystems other than Bitcoin and Ethereum are emerging"
This is Electric Capital’s fourth annual Developer Report, and we analyzed 250 million code commits, with more than 300 people contributing to this year’s report.
Let’s dive in deeper?
Image source: Generated by Maze AI
TLDR: Monthly development is up 5% year-over-year, while prices are down over 70%; 23,000+ developers per month; 471,000 code commits per month; 3,900 developers per month in the DeFi subfield; 61,000 new developers exposed to crypto code in 2022; In addition to Ethereum, there are several public chain ecosystems with more than 500 developers and growing in the bear market;
There are 23,343 active developers per month, a 5% increase from last year. In 2022, 61,000 developers contributed open source code in the crypto field for the first time, setting a record high!
Since 2021, more than 100,000 developers have contributed code to crypto.
So how many developers are highly dedicated?
We divide developers based on the frequency of their monthly code commits.
Full-time developers grew faster (+8%) than overall as one-time developers decreased (-8%).
Full-time developers make 76% of commits and are the least likely to churn over time.
Developer growth is slower than in 2020 or 2021, but consistent with previous bear market cycles.
Developers emerge in bull markets and growth stagnates in bear markets, so we should view growth in the context of the cycle.
Although the overall price of the crypto market is at the level of 2018, the developer ecosystem is several times larger:
Among them, the number of Bitcoin ecosystem developers increased by 3 times, the number of Ethereum ecosystem developers increased by 5 times, and Solana, Polygon, Cosmos, and Polkadot increased from less than 200 developers to more than 1,000 developers per month.
Bitcoin development remains active and stable:
920 monthly active developers;
The number of full-time Bitcoin developers decreased by 4%, the number of part-time developers increased by 9%, and the number of one-time developers decreased by 32%;
Since 2017, over 1,000 new developers have contributed to Bitcoin each year throughout the market cycle;
The Ethereum ecosystem is the largest in the crypto field:
5,734 monthly active developers;
The number of full-time developers increased by 9%, the number of part-time developers increased by 6%, and the number of one-time developers decreased by 8%;
Among the new developers joining the crypto field, 16% submitted code for Ethereum;
Some other high-growth ecosystems that barely existed in 2018 and are now quite large include:
Solana, NEAR, Polygon, the annual growth rate of developers in these ecosystems exceeds 40%, and the number of developers per month exceeds 500.
Sui, Aptos, Starknet, Mina, Osmosis, Hedera, Optimism, Arbitrum, the developers of these ecosystems increased by more than 50% year-on-year;
Growth in other ecosystems has been impressive overall:
28% of developers work on Bitcoin and Ethereum;
50% of developers work for the top 200 projects by network value;
22% of developers work on projects outside of the top 200;
It takes years for a development community to reach critical mass and grow:
Polkadot, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Cosmos took years to grow to more than 1,000 developers;
Polygon, Solana, NEAR, Kusama, and Binance Chain have 150 full-time developers in less than 4 years, which is the fastest growth in the emerging ecosystem;
Multichain developers are growing:
Of all ecosystems with more than 50 full-time developers, 37% are EVM-compatible;
More and more deployers are developing more than 1 chain;
Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Chain, Celo, Arbitrum, and Optimism have more multi-chain developers;
DeFi and NFT are the use cases with the highest gas usage in crypto. So how are developers in these two areas performing?
240% growth in DeFi developers since DeFi Summer;
500 new developers join the DeFi space every month;
50% of DeFi developers work outside the Ethereum ecosystem;
How big is the NFT development community?
Open source NFT projects have over 900 developers per month;
Monthly developer numbers have grown 299% since 2021;
But this data isn’t always the best way to look at NFT growth — many NFT projects are closed source, and many NFT projects don’t require extensive on-chain code!
method:
We focus on open source code, so we underestimate the total number of crypto developers, and this report does not include designers, community mods, pm, etc.
Furthermore, we focus on unique codes, without computationally forked codes.
These are imperfect, but directionally useful.
Thanks for the feedback!
Why do we care about developers? Developer engagement is an early leading indicator of value creation for emerging platforms.
Because crypto is largely open source, we have a unique and unprecedented ability to understand emerging industries.
You can get more data and the full report at DeveloperReport.com.