Developers Still Flocking to Cryptocurrencies Amid Severe Winter

Full-time crypto developers hit a record high last year, with 23,000 individual developers opening source every month, according to Electric Capital’s annual developer report, despite the crypto market plummeting in 2022. Contributing code.

This report measures the number of one-time, part-time, and full-time developers contributing to 250 million code commits in open source code repositories such as GitHub and Bitbucket.

Maria Shen, partner at Electric Capital and one of the authors of the annual developer report, said:

The report found that monthly active developers increased 5% year over year, despite a 70% price drop. In its fourth edition, Electric Capital compared the 2022 figures to those of the last crypto winter cycle, which began in January 2018. Since then, monthly active developers have grown by a whopping 297% across multiple blockchain ecosystems.

The biggest growth for developers has been seen outside of Bitcoin
Bitcoin
and Ethereum
ethereum
, is home to the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. While both increased significantly to January 2018 levels (ecosystem developers grew 3x and 5x, respectively), Electric Capital saw 72% of monthly active developers on the two dominant chains. found working outside of

Solana
Sol
shortly
shortly
and polygon
matic
The second largest increase is seen in developers, with 40% year-on-year growth in developers, and new ecosystems such as Sui, Aptos,
Aptos
both created by former Meta employees, have grown 50% year-over-year.

A lot of the growth in these ecosystems comes from full-time developers. A full-time developer is measured in reports that he contributes 10 or more commits per month. This emphasis boils down to the fact that he contributes most of the code, says Shen.

“They keep the lights on, they build core protocols, and they stay there,” says Shen.

On the other hand, new developers tend to follow pricing cycles, Shen added, while one-time or part-time developers add code to repositories as a hobby or as part of a hackathon. In fact, his 95% of developer churn is due to these developers, and most of the code is contributed by full-time developers.

Despite the growing number of developers, the main problem plaguing crypto and blockchain companies is the variety of coding languages ​​and the overall shortage of qualified software engineers. Coding smart contracts requires knowledge of specialized coding languages ​​such as Solidity and Rust. This could easily alienate an experienced engineer working at his traditional Web2 company.

“We have to think about quality,” says John Wu, president of Ava Labs, the New York-based creators of Avalanche.
Avax
Blockchain told Forbes in August. “What a developer is doing now may not be what he needs to do six months from now.”

But lower prices and a slowdown in crypto hype may be exactly what developers needed. “The developer switched from needing to make himself a brute force. [crypto winters] It’s about positioning for the next market cycle,” says Gokal.

Solana, the fastest growing ecosystem this year, grew 83%. Gokal cites Solana’s use of Rust as its primary coding language as one potential reason for its growth. Despite the 83% price drop year-on-year, Gokal said he had little difficulty finding experienced developers for Solana-based applications.

“The quality of Solana ends up being very high because it attracts developers who are comfortable with low-level programming languages ​​like C and C++,” he says, adding that in his experience, people who are proficient in these languages It usually takes a developer several weeks to learn Rust.

Full-time developers are also increasingly working across chains, the report found. Most developer accounts still have him deploying contracts on only one chain, but especially on his Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chain, the average number of chains he expects to grow to almost 1.4 in 2022. Did.

“Many ecosystems have more cross-chain developers than native developers,” says Shen. For example, Avalanche has lost 28% of his primary developers and has gained 8% of his multi-chain developers building on the system.

The report also touches on some of the most talked about events of the year, such as the Ethereum merger and the collapse of Terra.
Luna 3
.

Ethereum’s monthly developer count has increased five-fold since the last crypto winter cycle to 5,819, making it the ecosystem with the largest number of developers, accounting for 16% of all new developers in the cryptocurrency. occupies. Full-time developers, up 9% from December 2021, were primarily responsible for merging Ethereum from a proof-of-work mechanism to a proof-of-stake chain.

“These types of fundamental events mean slow and steady developers grow a little bit slower, because they do a lot of work,” says Shen.

Ethereum’s next update, the Shanghai Update, is scheduled to go live in March of this year and will allow withdrawal of Ethereum staked on the chain’s beacon update.

As for Terra, which surpassed last year’s list as the fastest growing ecosystem in terms of full-time developers, the report found that 56% of developers who worked for Terra continued contributing to open source code after the collapse. I discovered that I quit.

The ecosystem grew 313% from December 2020 to December 2021, accounting for a total of 33 full-time developers, but was de-pegged from USD by May 7. terraUSD drops to 35 cents, companion token LUNA
Luna
By May 12th, it had fallen to 80 cents. After that, not only did the ecosystem collapse, but a massive contagion erupted across the cryptocurrency industry, devaluing the entire cryptocurrency market by $1 trillion.

Shen defended the company’s methodology, saying “it wasn’t a code bug” that led to bankruptcy. “It was exploited because the financial mechanism of the stablecoin was broken,” she added.

After the crash, 42% moved to other ecosystems and 9% remained working on Luna 2.0. The largest share (13%) went to Cosmos.
atom
the self-proclaimed “Internet of Blockchains”.