Great sign for the ecosystem: Crypto devs are as bullish as ever

Never mind last year’s crushing bear market in crypto. Developers are undaunted, continuing to write code at roughly the same pace as they did during the height of the bull market, according to a surprising new analysis released today.

The analysis comes via Electric Capital, a digital-asset management firm that invests in programmable money and blockchain tech. Its team “fingerprinted” more than 27,000 code repositories and 22 million code commits in Github, to create a report that looks at the health of crypto development. 

Short-timers' attitude

The analysis showed that though there has certainly been attrition among developers, much of it can be attributed to part-time devs who may have just been dabbling with Web3 technology during the boom.

“Understanding where developers are spending their time is a good way to understand where long-term value may accrue," Avichal Garg, co-founder of Electric Capital told Decrypt. 

He pointed out that everything in the new ecosystem depends on devs: Coders create the wallets, dapps, exchanges and infrastructure that’s driving the Web3 ecosystem. “This onboards more users and brings liquidity into the market, he added, ” which, in turn creates a virtuous circle, driving “more developers to want to build more things in that ecosystem.”

The tl;dr

Some highlights of  the 104-page analysis:

• The biggest developer communities continue to be Ethereum, with more than 1,200, and Bitcoin, with more than 300.
• 1 in five open soruce developers working in crypto are working on Ethereum-related projects.
• Among smaller networks, with less than $50 million in value, Grin has the most devs—33.
• The largest crypto ecosystems are starting to become “meaningful” and share similarities with some of the big open source projects such as Apache and Linux.

The biggest surprise

“I think the most surprising part is that while prices have gone down 80% from all time highs, code commits are flat,” Garg said.

“This means long-term-minded developers are continuing to write code. Interestingly, the graphs at the end also show that full time developers who do most of the work in the space keep coming in to crypto—even in a bear market. They come in more during a bull market, but they are continuing to enter in a bear market as well, which is great.”