Developer activity shows healthy growth of the crypto space

Crypto developers do what they do best: build.

The number of weekly active developers has ranged from 6,000 to 7,000 since the start of 2023, according to a dashboard from crypto data firm Artemis.xyz. The number of daily active developers as of Wednesday is close to 1,700, according to blockchain analytics firm Token Terminal’s latest data.

Token Terminal shows that developers have pushed roughly 4,500 commits every week this year to public GitHub repositories in the crypto ecosystem. Artemis, on the other hand, shows that the number of weekly developer commits is over 50,000 in the same time period.

Commits is a term for “the smallest unit of work for developers … usually a good proxy for developer productivity,” Artemis says on its website.

Despite the decline in weekly commitments from 2022 to 2023, weekly active developers across the crypto ecosystem have grown steadily over the past three years as there are more active developers in this year’s bear market compared to the 2020 bear market.

Jimmy Zhang, who works in the Business Operations & Strategy department at Artemis, wrote in an email to CoinDesk, “The daily active developers/committing data continues to give us confidence that people are continuing to build into the crypto ecosystem.”

The discrepancy between the Artemis and Token Terminal figures on the number of active developers and code commits may come from how Artemis sources developer data from core ecosystems and sub-ecosystems, which include developers building applications on top of individual blockchains. Every year, developer numbers and commitments drop during the holidays, suggesting that developers are taking time off for the holidays.

According to Artemis, in the week starting June 6, 2022, when CoinDesk’s Consensus took place in Austin, Texas, around 9,700 developers were active. In the week of September 11, 2022, when Ethereum transitioned to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, approximately 9,200 developers were active, defined as a developer pushing at least one commit during the week.

In the week of November 6, crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy protection, and yet crypto developers pushed for 71,200 commitments.

Some developers are trying to build “Infinite Garden,” a bountiful ecosystem where people nurture growth for the Ethereum protocol, while others are focused on prioritizing cypherpunk ideals in their work. No matter what event is happening at the moment—whether it’s a festival showcasing all that crypto has to offer, a major upgrade to a protocol, or a company filing for bankruptcy—developers are waking up and developing the crypto ecosystem.