Ethereum Sees Surge in Developer Participation Over Nine Months
More than 16,000 developers have joined Ethereum in under a year, reflecting a growing interest in the platform compared to its competitors, Solana and Bitcoin.
More than 16,000 new developers have entered the Ethereum ecosystem from January to September this year, based on a report from the Ethereum Foundation referencing data from Electric Capital.
Solana follows closely, attracting over 11,500 developers, though a representative from the Solana Foundation suggested the data might be dated.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin drew nearly 7,500 new developers.
Ethereum Developer Growth
Source: Ethereum Foundation
The report indicates that Ethereum now boasts the largest active developer pool among blockchain projects, totaling 31,869 developers. Solana ranks second with 17,708, followed by Bitcoin at 11,036.
It is essential to note that the Ethereum ecosystem’s data includes both Ethereum layer-1 and its layer-2 networks, as defined by L2Beat, such as Arbitrum and Optimism, ensuring no double counting of developers across the networks.
Solana’s Noteworthy Expansion
Despite leading overall, the growth of full-time developers on Ethereum has been modest, with only 5.8% growth in the past year and 6.3% over two years.
Conversely, Solana has seen impressive growth rates of 29.1% in the last year and a remarkable 61.7% over two years, as per the developer tracker by Electric Capital.
Questions Regarding Solana’s Developer Count
Jacob Creech, the Head of Developer Relations at Solana Foundation, remarked that Electric Capital’s findings might undercount the developers on Solana by approximately 7,800. He encouraged developers to register their GitHub repositories to facilitate better monitoring of Solana-related activities on GitHub.
Others have raised concerns about the data, noting discrepancies in how chains are categorized, with some excluded despite operating on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Tomasz K. Stańczak, the founder of Nethermind, suggested, “EVM chains should be grouped together. Developers on Polygon and BNB clearly can reuse the majority of skills and EVM tooling.”
Cointelegraph attempted to contact Electric Capital for a response but received no comment before this article’s publication.
Is AI Impacting Developer Statistics?
In a related note, Jarrod Watts expressed skepticism about the influx of new developers, positing that AI coding and hackathons might inflate these statistics, stating, “IMO this data likely includes a ton of vibe coding slop and hackathon repos that are never touched again… I don’t think I can name one new crypto dev that started this year.”
