The notion that bear markets are good for builders appears to be true with the number of monthly active Web3 developers increasing by 5.4% to over 23,300 over the last 12 months despite a 70% drop in crypto prices.
By January 16th report from Electric Capital, “full-time” developers – categorized as those who contribute to 76% of Github commits – also increased by 15.2% to more than 7,000, while “one-time” developers fell by 6.2% to more than 3,500 during the same time between. December 2021 and December 2022
Although the crypto market capitalization started a long plunge from the all-time high (ATH) from $2.9 trillion in November 2021, monthly developer activity only began to decline in June 2022 after the metric reached a record high of nearly 26,500.
This fall is partly due to the drop in developer activity in the Terra ecosystem after that catastrophic collapse in May. 2022.
The next three months from June to September saw a 26% fall in active Web3 developers each week.
But in 2022, 61,127 new Web3 developers came to the industry – the most on record and an increase of 25.8% from 2021.
In fact, more new Web3 developers used the first line of open-source crypto code last year (109,723) than between 2014 and 2020 (101,054).
Ethereum continues to dominate developer activity, increasing the number of full-time developers by 9% to 1,873 – which is more than the top three ecosystems combined – Polkadot (752), Cosmos (511) and Solana (383).
The developer counts on non-Ethereum chains that are catching up though. The Cosmos and Solana networks increased by 34% and 36%, respectively Starknet is one of the mid-sized ecosystems that has been running steadily in 2022 with a 214% increase in the number of developers.
related: On the minds of blockchain developers: Building DApps that are truly free to use
The report also found that after the collapse of Terra only 28 (9%) of the original Terra developers stuck with Terra 2.0 while 143 developers (42%) did. called quits and migrate to other ecosystems.
Many former Terra developers migrated to Cosmos, 42 out of 143, the most of any other ecosystem.
Electric Capital explains that there are more Web3 developers than expected in the report because some projects are close.
