Research: with 4,000+ monthly active developers, Ethereum has the largest open-source crypto ecosystem, followed by Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin
1. — Kui üldse keegi, siis 2021.a. staariks oli kogu krüptoturg. DeFi Insights : Buckling Up for 2022 — Happy New Year! ✨ — Bounding out the gate ‘woohoo...’ to blood on the streets ‘...oh’. Justinas Baltrusaitis / Finbold : Study: Number of monthly active Web3 developers hit an all-time high in 2021 Ash / Web3 Investor : Web3 Developer Report Tweets: @avichal : 1/ Time for @ElectricCapital's Annual Developer Report: https://medium.com/... We analyzed 150m+ repos & xM code commits to produce these 100+ charts. This was a community effort: 150 people contributed via email and Github! Thank you everyone who helped. Let's dig in👇 @iamnomad : i dont agree with all the number presented or the methodology of defining ‘blockchain developers’ still a good read. its clear that new developer care about new projects ie most growth potential. https://twitter.com/... @jdh : 👀👀 Ethereum ~= to next 4 combined @ElectricCapital https://medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... @avichal : 25/ While the Web3 ecosystem continues to grow and is larger than ever, building real community takes time. Most communities take 2 years to get to more than 100 developers. https://twitter.com/... @avichal : 28/ DeFi has grown +76%, in line with overall web3 growth. 500 new developers commit code to a DeFi project each month https://twitter.com/... @avichal : 3/ tl;dr - Web3 is at All-Time Highs: * 18k+ monthly devs * 2.5k monthly devs in DeFi * 3k NEW devs touch web3 code each month * Several emerging ecosystems are growing faster than @Ethereum at the same stage in its history * 20-25% of new devs each month start on @Ethereum https://twitter.com/... @avichal : 7/ The rapid growth in new developers means that 60% of the developers in web3 started in 2021! Looking at developers checking in code >10 days/month, 45% of full time devs joined in 2021. Any way you slice it, almost half of the devs in web3 are fairly new. https://twitter.com/... @avichal : 6/ Over 3,000 *new* developers try Web3 every month - an all-time high. While many of these developers are hobbyists and will leave, some make it a career. As @cdixon says, “What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years” https://twitter.com/... @avichal : 4/ Starting at the top, we have 18,400+ developers, +75% from the start of 2021. This is big growth after almost two years of trending sideways. Remember, this is only open source devs. There are many developers writing closed source or working at companies not counted here. https://twitter.com/... @avichal : 2/ Our methodology: We focus on open source code, so we undercount total developers in web3. We focus on unique code and do not count purely copy/paste code. These are all imperfect measures but directionally useful to understand web3 growth. Feedback is appreciated! https://twitter.com/... Raj.Sol / @rajgokal : developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Ethereum's developer lead is a decade-long story, not a new one: back in 2016 a Coinbase cofounder argued its app development was already outpacing Bitcoin thanks to better tooling and a focused community (Coinbase cofounder on Ethereum's developer edge). Electric Capital's 2021 report quantifies that lead at its peak — 4,000+ monthly active developers, an all-time high for Web3, with Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin trailing in that order.
What makes the snapshot worth tracking is how it aged: by end-2023 monthly active crypto developers had fallen 25% to 22,266 (the 25% developer decline of 2023), and Electric Capital's own 2024 survey found total developers down another 7% with Solana overtaking as the top chain for newcomers (the 2024 Electric Capital survey) — so the 2021 ranking marks the high-water mark of the cycle.
First-order effects
- Ethereum enters 2022 holding both the largest developer base and the strongest application activity — DeFi accounted for 97% of Ethereum dapp activity in mid-2020 (DeFi's dominance of Ethereum dapp activity) — giving it the deepest bench of builders heading into the bull market.
- Bitcoin's position at the bottom of the top five confirms the split between its monetary-asset focus and the smart-contract chains where open-source contribution concentrates.
Second-order effects
- Developer mindshare becomes the metric competitors manage toward: Polkadot and Cosmos rank second and third despite far smaller user bases, because grants and SDK investment target exactly the builders Electric Capital counts.
- Solana's later rise as the most popular chain among new developers shows the ranking is contestable — user-facing traction like Tron and EOS's 2019 dapp-user lead over Ethereum (Tron and EOS's 2019 dapp-user lead) can precede, not follow, developer share.
Third-order effects
- Developer headcount has hardened into the industry's leading indicator for ecosystem durability — but the subsequent two years of declines show it is cyclical with the funding cycle rather than a one-way ratchet, so rankings should be read against the market phase they were measured in.
- If the pattern holds, chain competition consolidates around whichever platforms retain builders through downturns, since code committed in bear markets is what ships in the next cycle.
The trend: Open-source developer counts have become the industry's standard scoreboard for which blockchain wins builder mindshare, tracked annually and moving with the funding cycle.