Electric Capital Releases 2022 Crypto Developer Report

Executive Summary

We are 14 years into the creation of open-source crypto. In the first 7 years, 1,000 monthly active developers wrote code. In the last 7 years, crypto gained over 22,000 monthly active developers.

1.  Monthly active developers grew +5% year-over-year, despite 70%+ decline in prices.

• 23,343 monthly developers as of December 2022.
• 471,000+ monthly code commits are made monthly toward open-source crypto.
• +8% YoY growth in Full-Time developers. Full-Time developer growth is the most important growth signal to track because they contribute 76% of code commits.
• All-time high of 61,000+ developers contributed code for the first time in 2022.

2.  Crypto network value is back to January 2018 levels, but monthly active developers have increased +297% since 2018. Comparing the previous crypto winter to today:

• 3x growth in Bitcoin monthly active developers, from 372 to to 946
• 5x growth in Ethereum monthly active developers, from 1,084 to 5,819
• Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos, & Polygon grew from fewer than 200 devs to 1,000+ developers.

3.  Major ecosystems are emerging beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.

• 72% of monthly active devs work outside the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.
• Solana, NEAR, and Polygon grew 40% YoY and have 500+ total monthly active developers.
• Sui, Aptos, Starknet, Mina, Osmosis, Hedera, Optimism, and Arbitrum grew 50%+ YoY and have 100+ total monthly active developers.
• 3,901 developers work in DeFi every month across multiple chains, +240% since DeFi summer. 50% of DeFi developers are outside of Ethereum.
• 900+ developers write code monthly in NFTs across chains, +299% since 2021.

Go to DeveloperReport.com for more data and the full report

They are excited to launch DeveloperReport.com to showcase the data that goes into creating the annual Developer Report. Their aim is to provide a transparent, open, data source for the community.

They will be adding more visualizations, more data, and moving towards more real-time updates at DeveloperReport.com. They will continue to publish an annual Developer Report with detailed analysis on an annual basis as well.

Why Developers?
An early and leading indicator of value creation in emerging platforms is developer engagement. Developers build killer applications that deliver value to end users, which attracts more customers, which then draws more developers.

Because crypto is significantly open source, they have a unique and unprecedented ability to understand an emerging industry that may be worth many trillions.

250+ Contributors: Tracking the Crypto Developer Community is an Open-Source Effort
In the first Developer Report published in 2019, they only tracked 3,000 crypto ecosystems and 21,000 repos. This year they tracked over 9,000 ecosystems and over 163,000 repositories specifically dedicated to crypto, comprised of over 124 million lines of code.

Finding, tracking, and mapping these crypto repositories is a community effort. Thank you to the 250+ contributors who added repositories to the Crypto Ecosystems Github. If you are working in open-source crypto, please help the community by adding your repo to the mapping.