Ethereum Dominates Among Developers, But Rivals Are Growing Faster

The Ethereum ecosystem still has far more developers than rival networks, but they are catching up at a faster rate of growth.

Ethereum competitors such as Polkadot, Solana, and Binance Smart Chain are growing faster in terms of development activity, according to findings on the blockchain development ecosystem published in a new report by cryptocurrency research firm Electric Capital on Jan. 6. quick.

According to the report, 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 the number of code commits by new developers exceeds 34,000 in 2021.

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

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

Other ecosystems that are 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 — with more than 20% of new Web3 developers joining its ecosystem — rival networks have seen greater growth.

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

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

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

Over the past year or so, Solana, Avalanche, BSC, NEAR, and Terra have become DeFi hubs, attracting more developers as adoption increases. DeFi full-time monthly active contributors have increased by 64%. Except for January last year, more than 500 new developers contributed code to DeFi projects every month.