Even in a year-long bear market, the number of developers coming into the crypto industry continues to grow.
According to a January 17 report from Electric Capital, the number of active developers has doubled in the past two years. The researchers analyzed 250 million code commits and more than 300 people contributed to the report.
In early 2021, there were approximately 12,000 total monthly active developers. By the end of 2022, this number had increased to around 24,000. Furthermore, it has reached over 26,000 monthly active developers in June 2022.
About half of active developers are part-time, it noted. More than 7,000 full-time developers were employed by mid-December 2022. More than 60,000 new developers will touch crypto code in 2022, it said.
“Full-time devs account for 76% and are least likely to churn with the least amount of time off,” the report said.
Crypto developers and repos are on the rise
Nevertheless, the report notes that there has been a slight decline in the number of active developers since mid-2022. This coincides with a bearish rising market and a likely recovery in market sentiment.
In addition, the number of new monthly repositories has increased by 80% over the past two years. According to the data, by the end of 2022, there were 3,784 new monthly repositories.
Ethereum remains the top ecosystem in terms of active devs. It had a total of 5,734 developers as of December 2022. This equates to roughly a quarter of the total work done on Ethereum-related projects.
Polkadot and Solana were a distant second with nearly 2,000 total active developers at the end of last year.
Cosmos was the next ecosystem in terms of active developers, with just under 1,800, while Polygon had nearly 1,100. There were a total of 920 active developers for the bitcoin network by the end of 2022.
Smaller ecosystems such as Sui Network, Aptos, Mina Protocol, StarkNet, Osmosis, Hedera, Optimism, and Arbitrum grew 50% year-over-year.
bear market development
The numbers are representative of a healthy crypto dev ecosystem, despite a 70% market crash in 2022.
Electric Capital investor Maria Shen said growth was slower in 2020 or 2021 but in line with prior bear cycles.
“The gods come in a bull and growth stops during the bear, so we must look at growth in terms of cycles.”
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