Source: news.google.com
Last January, there were more than 18,000 monthly active developers in the Web3 ecosystem, according to crypto firm VC Electric Capital. The firm has just released a tracking report, which states that there are 23,343 monthly developers as of December 2022. That number had passed the 26,000 mark during June 2022, but the “more than 70% price decline” of cryptocurrencies for the rest of 2022 halted the upward growth curve. Electric Capital claims that it “crawled over 9,000 ecosystems and over 163,000 repositories specifically dedicated to cryptocurrency” for the new report.
Overall, the number of monthly active developers increased by 5% year-over-year, which isn’t bad considering the cryptocurrency crash, but this is also partly due to the natural rate of growth for all developers. .
Before we take a closer look at the developer activity statistics, it’s interesting to look at the different categories of developers in Web3:
The report states that 72% of monthly active developers work outside of the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystem. Solana, NEAR, and Polygon in particular became more popular, growing 40% year-over-year.
The fact that the two largest cryptocurrencies by market value, Bitcoin and Ethereum, together only account for 28% of total monthly developers is a reflection of how many blockchain projects have been launched in recent years, thousands of them. .
Ethereum still dominates, but Solana and others grow
In terms of developer activity, Ethereum dwarfs all other blockchains, which is nearly three times the size of its closest development rival. The top five blockchains by developers are Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos, and Polygon, all of which have over 1,000 developers. Bitcoin is sixth, with a shadow below 1,000.
Solana was the top mover last year, with a 74% increase in total developers. That said, Solana was also in the news last year for the wrong reasons: security issues that had people wondering, how secure is it really?
The Ethereum chart seems to closely mirror the overall chart, rising strongly from mid-2020 to mid-2022, then crashing after the last crypto winter.
EVM, DeFi and NFTs
Ethereum’s influence on the Web3 developer market is even more dominant than it appears at first glance. According to the report, “many major emerging ecosystems are EVM-compliant,” meaning they use the “Ethereum Virtual Machine” (EVM) platform. So a “dApp” (decentralized application) written in Solidity, which is what Ethereum dApps use, will also be able to run on Avalanche. Electric Capital notes that EVM is now a “core technology” of Web3.
Unsurprisingly, DeFi (decentralized finance) and NFT are the top two use cases for Web3 development. There are currently 3,901 “monthly active open source developers” working on DeFi, while 929 are working on NFTs. The latter experienced a rally during the first half of 2022, almost hitting the 1,200 mark, but ended the year flat, with the same number of developers as December 2021.
NFT developer activity is surprisingly little, but keep in mind that NFTs have a lot more activity on the user side. The report states that 80% of crypto wallets in 2022 had their first transaction in relation to NFTs. As the report says, “a relatively small number of developers can create reusable components and the amount of smart contract code written will be small relative to community participation.”
Conclution
In general, it is not surprising that developer activity has declined since the crypto winter began in mid-2022. It is likely that it will continue to decline for at least a few more months.
Web3 has also lost some of its hype value, with generative AI now the talk of the town in Silicon Valley. One feels that Web3 will have a hard time regaining developer interest for the rest of this year unless cryptocurrency prices rebound significantly. But that will be dictated by the financial markets, not the tech industry.
As I did last year, it’s also worth emphasizing how small the Web3 developer community is compared to much more established programming environments. According to a November report from Slashdata, JavaScript is the world’s largest programming language community, with an estimated 19.6 million developers using it. Python, which is widely used in AI development, ranks second with 16.9 million. So Web3 is still a small niche compared to most other developer ecosystems.
Author’s Note: Thanks to Lawrence Hecht who helped research and provided information for this post.
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