Ethereum Leads in New Developer Growth Amidst Crypto Landscape

San Francisco, CA – New data from Electric Capital reveals that the Ethereum ecosystem has attracted more than 16,000 new developers from January to September 2023.

This impressive growth solidifies Ethereum as the largest developer base in the blockchain space, with a total of 31,869 active developers. Following closely, Solana gained over 11,500 new developers, although the Solana Foundation has indicated that this data may be outdated. Bitcoin, in comparison, welcomed nearly 7,500 new developers.

The statistics for the Ethereum ecosystem combine both the Ethereum layer-1 network and various layer-2 networks, such as Arbitrum and Optimism. Importantly, the count does not double-count developers working on multiple networks.

Despite this growth, the increase in full-time developers for Ethereum has only been 5.8% this past year and 6.3% over the last two years. Solana, however, experienced a significant increase of 29.1% in the past year, with a remarkable 61.7% rise in the preceding two years. Jacob Creech, the head of developer relations at Solana Foundation, stated that Electric Capital’s data may underreport Solana’s developer count by about 7,800.

Creech has encouraged developers to submit their GitHub repositories for better tracking of Solana-related activity.

Concerns about the data’s accuracy have been raised, particularly regarding the grouping of chains that operate on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Tomasz K. Stańczak, founder of Nethermind, noted that EVM chains, including Polygon and BNB, should be considered together as they rely on similar skills and tools.

On the other hand, Jarrod Watts, head of Australia for layer-2 network Abstract, has criticized the growing developer numbers, suggesting that a lot of the new activity stems from AI coding and hackathon projects that rarely see further engagement. ‘I don’t think I can name one new crypto dev that started this year,’ Watts said.