Sharplink CEO: One Million Ethereum Developers – Who Can Compete?

Original Author: CEO of Sharplink Joseph Chalom

Compiled by: Odaily Qin Xiaofeng (@QinXiaofeng 888 )

Editor's Note: On June 15, ETH staged a strong rebound, surging over 10% in a single day, reversing its previous downturn. Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom published a long post on X titled "Milestone: Ethereum Developer Count Exceeds One Million."

He stated that Ethereum's core advantage is not speed, but its ability to concentrate the largest and deepest talent pool; the true moat lies in the long-term ecosystem built through composability, standard-setting, and credible neutrality. These builders are currently focused on advanced topics like scalability and post-quantum cryptography, continuously solidifying Ethereum's position as the default operating system for financial internet. (Recommended reading: "Sharplink CEO: Liquidating ETH Now is Like Selling Amazon During the Dot-Com Bubble")

Below is the original article by Joseph Chalom, compiled and translated by Odaily. Enjoy~

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I just returned from Asia, where I met with Ethereum developers and ecosystem leaders. Special shoutouts to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV in Seoul, as well as our friends at SNZ, and the recently opened Ethereum Community Hub in Hong Kong — the first permanent physical Ethereum community space in Asia, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

What impressed me most was not just the enthusiasm, but the rigorous attitude and ambitious vision of the local builders. The caliber of projects, the spirit of experimentation, and the long-term thinking emerging from the global Ethereum ecosystem were deeply inspiring.

And these vibrant individuals put a human face to a number: According to data from Electric Capital, the total number of lifetime Ethereum developers has surpassed one million — specifically 1,012,824 unique contributors. No other ecosystem in the crypto space comes close.

A Milestone Worth Pausing For

One million is a round number, and round numbers are often hollow, but not this time. It represents the largest technical talent pool ever assembled around an open, permissionless blockchain network — and crucially, this talent pool is still deepening and expanding.

Of this million, approximately 232,000 developers have been active in the past twelve months.

Why Ethereum: The Truly Critical Question

For years, discussions in the crypto space have revolved around speed, fees, and throughput. Every new chain claims to be "faster than Ethereum." But the most important question in crypto has never been "which chain is the fastest," but another:

"Where will the best builders choose to build for the long term?"

On this question, Ethereum remains unique. Its advantage is not just technical; it is institutional, cultural, economic, and combinatorial — the accumulated result of a decade of developers, infrastructure, standards, tools, liquidity, research, applications, and social coordination. No other ecosystem can replicate this.

Ethereum has become the default operating system for programmable finance and internet-native capital formation.

What This Million Is Building, and Why It Deepens the Moat

Why a million developers is so critical lies in what they are doing right now. Today's focus is on the industry's most difficult, highest-stakes issues: core protocol scalability, privacy, post-quantum cryptography, and the agentic systems that will run on top of it.

Glamsterdam — Guarding core values through innovation. The planned Glamsterdam upgrade in 2026 shows how Ethereum advances while safeguarding its core values. Key changes include: built-in enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), Block Access Lists (BALs) for parallel execution and higher throughput, and potentially a higher Gas limit — all significantly enhancing Layer 1 capacity. Expanding to meet future demand while ensuring credible neutrality, security, and MEV fairness — this is the moat in dynamic action.

Synchronous Composability — Making many Rollups feel like a single chain. Composability has always been Ethereum's superpower; the next leap is extending it across Layer 2. Native Rollups and "Based Rollups," combined with synchronous composability, are the solution. A contract on one Rollup can directly call a contract on the mainnet or another Rollup within the same atomic transaction — no bridges, no waiting. Teams from Linea, the Ethereum Economic Zone, Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation are combining this design with real-time proofs. The result: dozens of Rollups begin to operate not as isolated networks, but as a single, cohesive chain. This is a direct response to the fragmentation criticism.

Quantum Resistance — Ethereum's most significant lead. No mainstream ecosystem is better prepared for the post-quantum era than Ethereum. The "Lean Ethereum" roadmap, the Ethereum Foundation's dedicated post-quantum security team established in early 2026, the pq.ethereum.org information hub, and over a dozen client teams running post-quantum interoperability devnets weekly — all constitute a coordinated open-source migration plan targeting approximately 2029. When quantum risk becomes a reality, institutions safeguarding trillions in assets will have only one concern: which chain prepared earliest and most thoroughly.

The Moat Beyond Developers: Composability, Standards, and Trust

This developer advantage is self-reinforcing, stemming from how Ethereum is built. Its deepest network effect is not liquidity, but the depth of composability: various applications act as interoperable financial Lego blocks — lending, stablecoins, exchanges, wallets, tokenized assets, oracles, Layer 2 Rollups — all interacting through shared standards, meaning developers never need to start from scratch. The EVM is the application layer of the crypto space, and Solidity skills are transferable across Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and hundreds of other networks.

Learning the Ethereum tech stack maximizes optionality, driving a flywheel effect — more developers, more tools, more liquidity, more institutions, which in turn attracts more developers to build composable protocols and assets. Liquidity begets liquidity, composability begets composability.

Furthermore, Ethereum dominates where real value congregates, not just where the noise is loudest:

Three forces further deepen this lead:

• Credible neutrality — Secured by over 900,000 validators (compared to Solana's ~800), this decentralization and platform neutrality is highly valued by large institutions.
• Modularity — Rollups like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism are not fragmenting Ethereum but expanding it into an increasingly interconnected modular internet economy, all inheriting the security of the main chain.
• Culture — Ethereum disproportionately attracts the top-tier researchers, cryptographers, and EIP standard authors who set the direction for the entire industry. This final advantage is also the hardest to fork.

There Is Only One Ethereum

Generating on-chain activity is one thing. Being the long-term coordination layer for internet-native finance — the layer trusted by the world's largest financial institutions — is another. Ethereum dominates the mindshare of major asset owners, who prioritize trust, security, and liquidity above all. I experienced this first-hand during my tenure at BlackRock.

In technology markets, ecosystems tend to consolidate around standards, liquidity, and developer mindshare over time. That is Ethereum's moat.

After spending time with these developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul and Hong Kong, I am more confident than ever in Ethereum's competitive advantage. I met the talent building the next generation of financial infrastructure — the future founders of our industry and the architects of agentic finance. These are the people and teams who will change the world.

Ethereum's future is happening right now.