35% of Bitcoin’s core team is from the US as monthly active developers fall in 2022
Bitcoin (BTC) investment firm NYDIG’s report revealed that 35.1% of Bitcoin’s core development team resides in the United States, and the core team is growing by 5 to 20 people every month.
There have been countless developers who actively participated in updating, maintaining and improving the Bitcoin network since its launch in January 2009. NYDIG’s report examines the technical evolution of this open source technology.
The size of the development team
According to the report, there are 13,057 unique developers who have contributed to the wider Bitcoin ecosystem, excluding those working on closed source solutions. Another 1,140 unique developers, on the other hand, have contributed to Bitcoin Core.
The average monthly number of active unique developers for Bitcoin Core varies between 40-60. The same number varies between 600 and 1,000 for the wider ecosystem.
The change in both numbers shows significant correlations to Bitcoin’s price cycles.
Demographics of the development team
While the identity of most developers is unknown, their geographic data is available.
NYDIG individually researched the location of each developer and revealed that a large majority of them (35.1%) reside in the United States
Germany and the Netherlands follow the US as second and third, with 13.3% and 8.9% respectively. The UK also makes the top-10 list by ranking seventh with 3.2%.
The report also says that the core developer team is growing by 5 to 20 people every month, while the number of developers contributing to the wider ecosystem is increasing much faster depending on price movements.
The figures also examine the age data of the developers to reveal that over half of the contributions have come from the developers who joined since the 2017 bull run.
Early development team
Satoshi Nakamoto announced the Bitcoin technology on October 31, 2008 by sending an email to a mailing list called ‘Cryptography Mailing List’ which consisted of cryptography enthusiasts. Bitcoin’s first public test version became available on January 8, 2009.
Satoshi mined the Genesis Block on January 12, 2009, and sent 10 Bitcoins to computer scientist Hal Finney, who became part of the early development team. In the following years, many crypto enthusiasts joined the team, including Laszlo Hanyecz, who bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins at the time.
Satoshi actively contributed and updated the code until the end of 2010. After he distanced himself from the project, the project manager and GitHub administrator roles were distributed to a few others and changed hands every few years.
