Major ecosystems are emerging beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, says 2022 Developer Report

Open-source crypto is an endeavor that started 14 years ago. In the first 7 years, 1,000 monthly active developers wrote code but it has grown to more than 22,000 monthly active developers in the last 7 years, according to the 2022 Developer Report.

Released by Electric Capital, the developer report is based on 250 million code commits across open-source repositories and works as an industry standard for understanding the landscape across crypto developer ecosystems.

More active developers despite 70% drop in crypto prices

The document reveals that there are now 23,343 crypto monthly active developers in crypto. Key highlights of the 2022 Developer Report include:

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.

“Please help the community by adding your repo to the mapping”

Developer engangement has been seen as an early and leading indicator of value creation in emerging platforms as they build killer applications that deliver value to end users, which attracts more customers, which then draws more developers.

Electric Capital’s Developer Report was first published in 2019, tracking only 3,000 crypto ecosystems and 21,000 repositories. This year, with the help of more than 250 contributors, the report 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”, Electric Capital said in the announcement. “If you are working in open-source crypto, please help the community by adding your repo to the mapping.”