The State of Crypto Programming Ecosystems
Which are the top 15 blockchain ecosystems for Web 3.0 programmers?
Developers and programming enthusiasts are more excited about the prospects of working at a crypto startup or for Web 3.0 movement than ever before in 2022.
Summary of the Electric Capital Report 2021
There’s a new report out by Electric Capital which is interesting for measuring the crypto programming ecosystem. They claim to have fingerprinted nearly 500K code repositories and 160 million code commits across Web3 to create the 2021 Electric Capital Developer Report.
A recent report by Electric Capital, which analyzed nearly 500 thousand code repositories and 160 million code commits across Web3, uncovered the top blockchain ecosystems based on one of the key “indicators of value creation”–developer engagement.
Here are some of the highlights:
Crypto developer activity reached an all-time high in 2021
2021 was an exciting year across Layer 1s, DeFi, and the entire blockchain ecosystem. A few key insights:
Crypto developer activity reached an all-time high in 2021
2021 reached an all-time high of over 18K monthly active developers
65% of active developers in crypto joined in 2021
Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin were the 5 largest developer ecosystems.
1- Ethereum
2- Polkadot
3- Cosmos
4- Solana
5- Bitcoin
Surprisingly Few Developers Work on Web 3.0’s Top Altcoins
More than 18.400 monthly active developers commit code in open source crypto and Web3 projects, revealed the report, noting that more than 4.000 of them work on Ethereum, while the number of those working on Bitcoin topped 680.
While they spin it as a great positive, the numbers are just surprisingly low.
Web3 developers are at an all-time high and growing faster than ever.
18,000+ monthly active developers commit code in open source crypto and Web3 projects
34,000+ new developers committed code in 2021 — the highest in history
4,000+ monthly active open-source developers work on Ethereum, 680+ open-source developers work on Bitcoin
20%+ of new Web3 developers join the Ethereum ecosystem
65% of active developers in Web3 joined in 2021; 45% of full-time developers in Web3 joined in 2021
Still it’s indicative of a huge up-trend that occurred in 2021 including:
There are several vibrant ecosystems emerging beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The largest ecosystems are Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, BSC, NEAR, Avalanche, Tezos, Polygon, and Cardano, each with 250+ monthly active developers
Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche, and Terra are growing faster than Ethereum did at similar points in its history
2,500+ developers are working on DeFi projects. Less than 1,000 full-time developers are responsible for over $100 billion in total value locked in smart contracts
6- NEAR
7- Avalanche
8- Tezos
9- Polygon
10- Cardano
Polkadot Shows the Most Improvement
I think one thing is clear from the report however, it’s that Polkadot surfaced in “a class of its own with clearly the strongest developer growth since the launch of any Web3 protocol and by far the biggest dev community outside of Ethereum,” Polkadot founder Gavin Wood commented the report.
Discussion
While Solidity remains the most specific to blockchain programing language, the fact that they are so many ecosystems for blockchain developers is pretty exciting.
Apart from the recent success of Polkadot, around 30% of all developers are writing code on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible Layer-1s.
The Upstarts have Momentum on their Side
Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, BSC, NEAR, Avalanche, Tezos, Polygon, and Cardano surfaced as ecosystems that have more than 250 monthly active developers.
While over 20% of new Web3 devs joined the Ethereum ecosystem, several other blockchains attracted impressive numbers in 2021.
In fact, Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche, and Terra are building their teams faster than Ethereum–when indexed to the date from 1st commit.
You can read the 130-slides of the report in this article here.
As for the momentum index for 2021:
Solana and NEAR deserve special mention.
Ethereum and Bitcoin continue to add developers growing by 42% and 9%, respectively over 2021.
As for the smaller tier ecosystems they are also growing fast:
Comparing average monthly active devs between December 2020 and December 2021–Terra, ICP, Fantom, and Harmony all quadrupled their teams, while Avalanche and Algorand followed, tripling theirs.
11 - Terra
12 - ICP
13 - Fantom
14 - Harmony
15 - Algorand
So there you have it, the fifteen ecosystems where crypto developers are active.
I’m not personally too sure what to make of Ethereum retention levels.
Ethereum retains 30% of full-time developers who joined after 2017.
Ethereum continues to have the largest ecosystem of tools, apps, and protocols, and is 2.8x larger than the second largest ecosystem.
Bitcoin has a pipeline of 100+ new developers coming into its ecosystem each month. Bitcoin averaged 600+ monthly active developers in December 2021.
34,000+ new developers worked on an open source Web3 project in 2021, the highest number of new developers in history. Over 3,000 new developers join Web3 every month in the last months of 2021.
That’s not terrible but a far cry from what some aspiring blockchain developers would have imagined.