In the past year, thousands of developers have abandoned cryptocurrencies, but in many other key metrics, the ecosystem appears as strong as ever.
That’s according to a new report released Wednesday from cryptocurrency venture firm Electric Capital, which says the number of active, open-source cryptocurrency developers fell sharply by 24% from the end of 2022 through 2023. As of last month, there were over Just over 22,000 developers currently work in the industry across a myriad of blockchains.
This decline is definitely due to the crypto winter that began after the $60 billion crypto collapse UST and LUNA In May 2022, onwards FTX breakdown In November of that year, discrediting cryptocurrencies and Industry growth.
But there is a silver lining to this trend: the vast majority of developers leaving the industry in 2023 appear to be fair-weather builders, who had not spent any previous time in crypto.
More than 52% of new cryptocurrency developers – with one year or less of experience – had left the industry by December 2023. In contrast, developers with one to two years of experience declined by only a marginal 1%, and developers with more than two years of experience. In reality I slept As a category by the end of the year, up a resounding 33%.
The geographic diversity of these developers has also grown over time. In 2018, US builders represented 40% of all cryptocurrency developers worldwide, according to Electric Capital. By 2023, this number has shrunk to 26%. Meanwhile, the share of cryptocurrency developers from non-Western countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America rose significantly in the same period, from 18% to 36%.
Europe continues to produce the largest number of cryptocurrency developers in the world, at 34% in the past year.
The types of blockchains these developers are working on have also evolved promisingly over the years. As of 2023, 34% of all creators are working on multi-chain, a notable increase that speaks to the scope and depth of development across the increasingly multi-chain cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Unsurprisingly, Ethereum continues to attract the majority of cryptocurrency developers; More than 8,000 programmers contributed continuously to the blockchain last year. But the Ethereum scaling network Polygon and its competitor Solana have also seen a notable rise in new contributors.
Slightly below those three networks in new developer activity, but impressive in their own right, are BNB Chain, Cosmos, Arbitrum, Polkadot, NEAR, Avalanche, Optimism, and Internet Computer – each of which attracted between 2,000 and 4,000 new developers in 2023. .
The fastest-growing new cryptocurrency ecosystem in 2023 was Base: Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 network, which It took the industry by storm After its launch in August. 999 unique developers contributed to Base during the last three months of 2023.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin, despite its status as the original blockchain, is no longer the coolest kid at the party. Where, in 2015, the network could boast that it had attracted more new developers than any other blockchain – 17% – by last year that number had shrunk to just 2%.
The Bitcoin ecosystem is now maintained by a core group of just over 1,000 developers. But some of these builders may be busier than others.
According to an Electric Capital report, less than 10% of Bitcoin developers are working on it ordinal, digital assets listed in small denominations of BTC similar to NFTs. Despite this relatively low number, the ordinal rankings, which were A The phenomenon of fugitives In 2023, it routinely accounted for more than 50% of transaction traffic on the Bitcoin network.
Edited by Andrew Hayward