Ethereum dominates developers, but rivals grow faster

The total number of monthly active developers reached a record 18,000, but Ethereum retained the most.

There are still far more developers in the Ethereum ecosystem than competing networks, but they are catching up at a faster rate.

Ethereum competitors such as Polkadot, Solana, and Binance Smart Chain have grown more in development activity, according to findings from cryptocurrency research firm Electric Capital on the blockchain development ecosystem in a new report on Jan. 6. quick.

The report shows that there are more than 4,000 active open-source developers working on Ethereum every month, far exceeding the 680 developers on the Bitcoin network. Across all chains, the total number of monthly active developers exceeds 18,400, while in 2021 the number of code commits by new developers exceeds 34,000.

Ethereum dominates developers, but rivals grow faster

These measurements were made by analyzing about 500,000 codebases and 160 million code commits, or changes or updates to code. The report notes that Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin are the five largest developer ecosystems overall.

According to the report, Polkadot has about 1,500 developers in total, while Cosmos and Solana have about 1,000 each.

Other ecosystems active in terms of monthly developers are Cosmos, NEAR (which launched an $800 million developer fund in October), Tezos, Polygon, and Cardano, each with over 250 monthly active developers.

While Ethereum still dominates -- more than 20 percent of new Web3 developers have joined its ecosystem -- rival networks have seen even greater growth.

“Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche and Terra are growing faster than Ethereum at similar points in its history.”

The report compares the average monthly active developers between December 2020 and December 2021, noting that Solana has grown 4.9 times, NEAR has grown 4 times, and Polygon has more than doubled its monthly developers. Over the course of 2021, Cosmos’ average monthly active developers have grown by 70% and BSC by 80%.

While development growth figures are impressive for more early-stage projects, Ethereum is still king. The ecosystem continues to retain the largest network of tools, dapps and protocols, 2.8 times the size of its closest competitor, Polkadot.

Over the past year-plus, Solana, Avalanche, BSC, NEAR, and Terra have become DeFi hubs, attracting more developers as adoption increases. DeFi full-time monthly active contributors grew by 64%, with more than 500 new developers contributing code to DeFi projects every month except January last year.