Developers are still flocking to crypto amid the brutal winter
Blockchain financial technology to secure cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin for online payments and money … [+]
Despite declining crypto markets in 2022, Electric Capital’s annual developer report found that full-time crypto developers reached an all-time high last year, with 23,000 monthly individual developers contributing to open source.
The report measured the number of one-time, part-time, and full-time developers who contributed to 250 million code commits in open source repositories, including GitHub and Bitbucket.
“Especially in the bear market, tracking the health of full-time developers is very important,” says Maria Shen, partner at Electric Capital and one of the authors of the annual developer report.
Monthly active developers grew 5% year-on-year, despite a 70% drop in prices, the report found. Now in its fourth edition, Electric Capital compared the numbers for 2022 with the numbers from the last crypto winter cycle, which started in January 2018. Since then, monthly active developers have increased a whopping 297% across multiple blockchain ecosystems.
The biggest developer growth was seen outside of Bitcoin
Solana
Significant growth in these ecosystems comes from full-time developers, who in the report are measured as those who contribute 10 or more commits per month. This emphasis, says Shen, boils down to them contributing the vast majority of the code.
“They keep the lights on, they build the core protocol, and they stay,” says Shen.
New developers, on the other hand, tend to follow price cycles, Shen adds, saying that one-time or part-time developers add code to repositories as a hobby or as part of hackathons. In fact, 95% of developer output came from these developers, and most of the code was contributed by full-time developers.
Despite an increase in the number of developers, the main problem plaguing crypto and blockchain companies is their varying coding languages and a general lack of qualified software engineers. Coding smart contracts requires knowledge of specialized coding languages such as Solidity or Rust which can easily alienate experienced engineers working in traditional Web 2 companies.
“We have to consider quality,” John Wu, president of Ava Labs, the New York-based creator of Avalanche
But a drop in prices and a drop in crypto hype could be just what developers needed. “Developers have switched from having to force themselves from [crypto winters] to position itself for the next market cycle, says Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana.
Solana, the fastest growing ecosystem of the year, grew by 83%. Gokal points to Solana’s use of Rust as its main coding language as one of the potential reasons for its growth. Despite being down 83% in prices year-over-year, Gokal shares that there was little trouble finding experienced developers for Solana-based applications.
“The quality ends up being much more concentrated with Solana because it attracts developers who are more used to lower-level programming languages like C and C++,” he says, adding that in his experience it usually takes developers who are fluent in these languages two weeks to learn Rust.
Full-time developers are also increasingly working across chains, the report found. While most developer accounts still only distribute contracts to one chain, the average number of chains rose to nearly 1.4 in 2022, especially in Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) compatible chains.
“Many ecosystems have more of these cross-chain developers than they have native developers,” says Shen. Avalanche, for example, lost 28% of its core developers, while multichain developers building on the system grew by 8%.
The report also touched on some of the most talked about events of the year, including the Ethereum merger and the collapse of Terra
Ethereum monthly developers have grown fivefold since the last crypto winter cycle to 5,819, becoming the ecosystem with the largest number of developers and accounting for 16% of all new developers in crypto. Full-time developers, which increased by 9% from December 2021, were largely responsible for the merger, which transitioned Ethereum from a proof-of-work mechanism to a proof-of-stake chain.
“These kinds of foundational events mean that the slow and steady developers grow a little slower, because they’re putting in so much work,” says Shen.
Ethereum’s next update – called the Shanghai update – is expected to go live in March this year, allowing the withdrawal of ethereum staked on the chain’s Beacon update.
As for Terra, which topped last year’s list as the fastest-growing ecosystem in terms of full-time developers, the report found that 56% of developers who worked at Terra stopped contributing to open source after it collapsed.
The ecosystem saw 313% growth from December 2020 to December 2021, accounting for a total of 33 full-time developers, but by May 7, terraUSD fell from the dollar to 35 cents and its companion token LUNA
Shen defended the firm’s methodology, saying “it wasn’t a bug in the code” that led to the collapse. “It was because the economic mechanism of how stablecoin worked was broken, so it was exploited,” she added.
After the crash, 42% migrated to other ecosystems, while 9% stayed to work on Luna 2.0. The largest share (13%) went to Cosmos
