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Several emerging blockchain ecosystems have grown faster than Ethereum has grown over the same period.
20% - 25% of the newly added Web3 developers will flow into the Ethereum ecosystem.
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Report Background
The report analyzed 500,000 code repositories and countless code commits to produce more than 100 graphs in the original article.
The report focuses on open source code, so undercounts the total developers of Web3 by a lot; also focuses on non-copy-pasted valid code.
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Web3 Ecosystem Overview
The total number of developers will grow by 75% in 2021
Web3 has 18,400+ developers, an increase of 75% compared to 2021. After nearly two years of sideways movement in the number of people, it is a big growth.
The number of developers grows with the currency price
It is easy to figure out that the number of developers grows as the price rises.
Here's the surprise: Monthly active developers peaked after the latest price bump. After the last pump, developers peaked a year after the price peaked.
Most surprising: While plummeting, the overall developer count remained flat. In a bear market, there is a balanced loss of new developers.
Monthly Growth of Web3 Developers Reaches All-Time Highs
More than 3,000 new developers try Web3 every month -- a historic high."What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years."
While many of these developers are experimenting with Web3 as amateurs and will leave the Web, some will make it a full-time career in the future.
As @cdixon said,
Half of Web3 developers will enter in 2021
The rapid growth in the number of new developers means that 60% of the developers in Web3 entered the Web3 field in the last year.
Through the statistics of developers who are active for more than ten days per month, we can know that 45% of full-time Web3 developers will join in 2021.
Almost half of the developers in Web3 are new blood.
10% of new Web3 developers will stick around for a year
How many of the Web3 developers are likely to stick with Web3?
10% of all developers will stick around by the end of the second year.
30% of full-time developers will stick with Web3-related full-time jobs for 4 years.
From the data, there is a correlation between when developers enter Web3 and the ultimate retention rate.
Developers who have experienced a bull market can often persist in a bear market. Those developers who joined at the top of the bull market are more likely to eventually leave.
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Comparison of Layer1 development ecology
The top 200 network ecosystems are growing faster than Ethereum and Bitcoin
In the past year, the network ecology of the top 200 by market value has grown by more than 66%, and the projects after the top 200 have grown faster, reaching 86%.
These are all growing faster than the ecosystems of Ethereum and Bitcoin, which may reflect that developers see more opportunities in ecosystems with smaller market capitalizations.
In the bear market, only Bitcoin and Ethereum can still maintain growth
Historically, once a bear market comes, none of the top 200 ecologies can maintain the same high growth, while the development ecologies of Bitcoin and Ethereum have shown continuous growth for several years.
The development ecology of Bitcoin and Ethereum is growing steadily
The number of full-time Bitcoin developers has grown by 8%, with 100 new developers contributing to the Bitcoin ecosystem every month. Ethereum has grown by 42% in total developers and 24% in full-time developers, with about 700 new developers contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem every month.
Ethereum's ecology maintains a strong appeal
Ethereum still attracts developers: 20-25% of new developers entering Web3 go to the Ethereum ecosystem. For those full-time developers, they tend to stay in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Comparison of the number of developers in the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems
Looking ahead to Bitcoin and Ethereum, how is the ecosystem developing?
By comparing December 2020 (X-axis) with December 2021 (Y-axis). The steeper the slope of the line connecting the origin and the number of ecological developers, the faster the growth rate.
The development tools, applications, and protocols of Ethereum are 2.8 times that of the second ecosystem
Ethereum continues to have the largest ecosystem of development tools, applications, and protocols. The size of Ethereum is 2.8 times that of the second largest Polkadot ecosystem.
Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana and Bitcoin are the top five ecosystems. Given that Bitcoin does not have smart contracts on the chain, it is reasonable for several other smart contract platforms to have a larger ecology.
Solana and NEAR get more than 4x growth
In addition to the growth of Ethereum and Polkadot, in 2021, Solana has grown by more than 4.9 times, and NEAR has achieved more than 4 times of growth, and has grown into the sixth largest ecology in 2021. As mentioned earlier, the growth of the ecology in the report may be underestimated, because only the open source codebase is considered.
Other mainstream ecology has a lot of growth
Polygon doubled its monthly developer count, while Cardano grew by 90%, BSC by 80%, Cosmos by 70%, and Bitcoin by 10%. The growth of Cosmos and Cardano is somewhat unique in that they started to heat up later than other protocols.
The growth of the new ecology is more rapid
For an ecosystem with 50-300 developers, we can see:
Quadrupled: Terra, ICP, Fantom, and Harmony
Tripled: AVAX, Algorand
Comparison of ecological growth over the same period
All of these projects were launched at different times. In order to visually compare the growth of the ecology in the same period, we use the date of the first submission in the ecology to compare.
New ecology can attract developers from other earlier ecology
Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, Bitcoin have all taken different paths to develop their ecology. New ecology can attract developers from other earlier ecology.
The entire Web3 developer ecosystem is much larger than it was 5-10 years ago, so the absolute numbers are growing faster.
During the same period, most of the top ten Layer 1 achieved higher growth than Ethereum
We also considered the top 10 Layer 1 based on market capitalization. From the date of the first public code submission as a benchmark, Polkadot, Solana, BSC, Near, AVAX, Terra grew faster than Ethereum.
Most communities take 2 years to reach 100+ developers
While the Web3 ecosystem continues to grow and is bigger than ever, building a real community will take time.
One way the team can accelerate growth is through compatibility with the Ethereum EVM. These EVM-compatible Layer1s are growing faster than Ethereum (+120% vs Ethereum's +42%).
It is feasible to use EVM compatibility to guide an ecological development strategy. AVAX and Celo seem to have been able to start the ecology from the compatibility of EVM, and guide their own ecological developers to pay attention to their own chains.
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DeFi Development Ecosystem Comparison
The growth of the DeFi development ecosystem is consistent with the overall growth of Web3
The development ecosystem of DeFi has grown by 76%, which is in line with the overall growth of Web3. 500 new developers submit code to DeFi projects every month.
The new DeFi ecology can be launched faster
OlympusDAO has grown from 0 to 60 developers in its ecosystem.
Traderjoe and Osmosis grew from 0 to 30 developers.
ComposableFin grew from 0 to 23 developers.
More than doubling growth: @mangomarkets, @BalancerLabs, @uniswap, @synthetix_io, @AcalaNetwork, @InjectiveLabs, @beefyfinance, and @SetProtocol.
NFT, DAO,More than triple growth: @anoma, @RariCapital, @JetProtocol, @Instadapp, @CurveFinance, @pangolindex.
The data of these types of projects is too noisy, and it is difficult to analyze from the number of developers and the activity submitted by developers. Choose not to analyze in the report.
Summarize
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Summarize
The number of Web3 developers has grown very strongly over the past few years.
But given the number of software engineers in the world, Web3 is still a long way off.
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