Knowing about the developer’s activity is important if you want to know if innovation can be measured by developer mindshare.
Electric Capital releases an annual report on developers every year. This is why industry professionals pay attention.
By November 2024 there were about 23,613 crypto developers working on a monthly basis. That’s 0.0875% of the total 27 million global software developers. This is an impressive increase of 2000% over the past decade. However, the numbers still remain below the highs reached by the industry in 2022.
A notable change in the crypto developer community is that talent has become more globally distributed today than it was previously. In 2015, North America and Europe accounted for 80% of all developers. Both continents’ share of devs has declined to 24% and 30% respectively. Asia is now leading with 32% developer mindshare.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) remains the leading tech stack, boasting a robust network effect with 8,925 developers — roughly 3.6 times the size of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) stack, which has 2,499 developers.
Solana is the top ecosystem in terms of new developers for the last year. This is an impressive lead, especially considering that Ethereum — which is a close second in attracting new developers — is bolstered by an ecosystem that includes dozens of layer-2 rollups.
Solana developers are the majority in India. They account for 27%. In India, new Solana developers join the ecosystem faster than in any other country. India ranks second behind the US in terms of developer share.
It isn’t necessary that the most active developers are also those who produce the most innovative code. Electric Capital’s developer report took into account the number of new codes written by chains.
Ethereum is still leading with 65% new code across both its layer-1 and 2 ecosystems.
According to the report, liquidity isn’t the only thing fragmenting in Ethereum — scarce developer talent is too. The report shows that since Ethereum’s rollup-centric road map was adopted, developers who work on layer-2s have grown from 25 to 56 percent.
Base, which is one of the active layer-2s has the highest developer base, at 4,287. It’s followed by Arbitrum, Starknet, Optimism, Scroll, and zkSync.
Starknet’s lead in developer activity may seem surprising if it is an indicator of chain activity. Starknet has been lagging behind in terms of transaction counts over the last year.
What’s the deal with Bitcoin?
Bitcoin has around 1,200 active monthly developers. The number is fairly stable over the last year.
Despite the fact that at least 42% bitcoin developers have now devoted their attention to layer-2s, non-transferable tokens (NFTs) and other scaling solutions.
The number of developers with zero knowledge has also decreased. In zk, 2,054 active monthly developers are working today. Around 823 are full-time employees.
It is interesting to note that zk deployments have grown from a meager 40 contracts in 2020 up to 639 contract in 2024. Ethereum, Base and Optimism are the leading contributors.
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