Crypto developers: the state of the industry’s moving force

How do you measure a blockchain’s success?

While Bitcoin is money, most other blockchains – Ethereum, Polygon, Solana or Polkadot… – they all serve primarily as smart contract platforms, enabling the creation of DApps and ushering the advent of web3.

🧑‍💻 The real success of these blockchains – and the idea of web3 in general – depends on whether the developers will create, and people will use the DApps.

Developers are key to the technology, and their commitment says loads about its future. In case of crypto, mostly created using open-source tools, we can measure this commitment and make assumptions on the development of the whole crypto industry, as well as specific blockchain’s.

We have browsed through several reports on crypto developers’ activity in 2022, notably from Electric Capital, Arcana and Alchemy, and here are the main takeouts:

📌 Crypto industry now counts over 23k monthly active developers. It is a 5% increase vs last year, despite the crypto markets’ 70% decline,

📌 An all-time high of over 61k developers contributed code for the first time in 2022,

📌 By December’22, there were over 471k monthly commits in open-source crypto, which is a 20% decline from an all-time high of June’22, but more or less the same as December’21,

📌 Ethereum is still king, with 5’734 monthly active developers, which is x2.8 larger than the next one – Polkadot,

📌 Leading web3 development platform Alchemy registered 1.8 million weekly downloads of core Ethereum tools in 2022, an 85% increase YoY,

📌 18% of Ethereum devs work on DeFi products, and 7% – on gaming and NFTs,

📌 Ecosystems with 1’000+ total devs : Solana +83%, Polygon +40%, and Cosmos +25%,

📌 Ecosystems with 300+ total devs : Starknet +134%, ICP +48%, NEAR +41%,

📌 There are currently over 16k DApps deployed: 48% in DeFi, 25% – gaming and NFT,

📌 The fastest growing category are social DApps.

It looks like the bear market was indeed for building 😎