- An overlooked factor of crypto market assessment
- Crypto development in numbers
- Crypto developers and statistics
A report of Electric Capital, a venture capital firm, shows that crypto developers are still interested in the industry: the activity of open-source software developers in crypto reached its peak in June 2022 and decreased by 11% by December 15.
An overlooked factor of crypto market assessment
According to the company’s annual report, the assessment of developer numbers and activity is oftentimes ignored but it is an important indicator for identifying future value of crypto projects.
The market is still on the decline. As reported by CoinGecko and Coinmarketcap, its market cap decreased by 71%: from 2.9 trillion US dollars in November 2021 to 860 billion US dollars in November 2022.
“Developers build killer applications that deliver value to end users, which attracts more customers, which then draws more developers,” Electric Capital wrote in its annual publication.
In 2022, the crypto industry’s number of monthly active developers increased by 21% from 18,416 to 23,343. This indicates that their activity remained more stable compared to the decrease in the prices of digital assets. This trend was seen despite the mass layoffs in crypto-related companies.
Crypto development in numbers
The crypto ecosystem of the world’s second cryptocurrency, ether (ETH), is still the leading one when it comes to developer activity. It has 1,873 active full-time developers and is followed by Polkadot (752), Cosmos (511), Solana (383), Bitcoin (300), Polygon (253), Kusama (250), NEAR (205), Cardano (163), and Tezos (147).
“We’re seeing the same thing this cycle that we saw in the last cycle [2017-2020]… Even when prices fall, developers do not proportionately respond,” said Mari Shen, an Electric Capital partner.
She also suggested that this fact makes developer numbers in crypto ecosystems a less rate sensitive method for assessing the condition of a crypto project.
Crypto developers and statistics
Electric Capital checked 124 million “code commits,” or updates including additions, revisions, and other changes made to open-source software in 2022. In its report, the developers are classified into full-time, part-time, and volunteer developers. Full-time is the strongest indicator of an ecosystem’s developer community in the times of a declining market.
Interestingly enough, the results take into account only the crypto programming done for public projects, ignoring those software developers who work on private projects for crypto companies. At the same time, a Binance representative has stated that the company has over 2,100 development engineers.
According to the report, as of December 15, 28% of all active developers work with either Ethereum or Bitcoin.
Throughout last year, Ethereum continued to have the largest developer community compared to other ecosystems. Mari Shen says that Ethereum is 2.5 times larger than Polkadot, which comes second. This can be explained partly by the fact that Ethereum hosts a larger number of DeFi applications and NFT projects.
The number of full-time Ethereum developers increased by 9% compared to the previous year — from 1,712 to 1,873. The community has also proved to be more efficient in retaining developers than any other of the top 200 crypto ecosystems.
On the contrary, Bitcoin’s number of monthly active developers has decreased by 4% from 312 to 300.
The total number of monthly active developers in crypto has more than doubled compared to 10,893 in August 2019 when Electric Capital published its first report.
“It’s a very different industry. A lot of [developers] are frankly, true believers… It has this kind of ideology around it, which I think means when prices drop there’s still a reason to build these things,” Shen explained.
