In 2022, the number of active blockchain developers increased amid a prolonged crypto winter. In total, new Web3 specialists grew by 25% year-over-year. Approximately 23,000 programmers worked on various GitHub commits each month.
According to the Electric Capital report, the number of full-time developers increased by 15.2% in 2022, while part-time specialists rose by 7%. However, the number of one-time developers fell by 6.2%. Overall, active blockchain developers accounted for about 23,300 professionals working on various Web3 projects each month.
The report found that in 2022, developers made over 471,000 commits monthly on GitHub that were related to work on open-source for a particular blockchain network. More than 61,000 developers contributed code changes for the first time in 2022, an all-time record for the industry. For example, there were 25% fewer new developers in 2021 and 183% fewer developers in 2020.
Electric Capital analysts attribute the upward trend in blockchain developer activity to bearish dynamics in the crypto market. Thus, the report said that the previous surge of programmer activity in the Web3 sphere was recorded during the 2017-2018 crypto winter, when the total number of developers amounted to over 44,000. The crypto winter of 2022 boosted this figure by half — more than 109,000 new active specialists came into the sphere.
At that, over 76% of all code commits were made by full-time developers. Electric Capital reports that 30% of developers work on code no more than one day per month. Half of the full-time developers take from two to nine days to change the code, and only around 20% of them work on the code for more than ten days a month.
As for the specific blockchain networks developing in 2022, the statistics of developer activity look like this:
- The number of Bitcoin developers in 2022 fell by 2.5% compared to 2021, and it stood at 920 active specialists per month on average.
- Ethereum code specialists increased by 5% to more than 5,700 monthly. Since February 2021, there has been a monthly average of about 800 new specialists working on Ethereum’s code.
- Polkadot’s code was improved in 2022 by over 2,000 specialists every month. However, this figure was only 1% higher than in 2021.
- Solana’s code had 36% more specialists working on it in 2022 than in 2021. On average, the network had approximately 1,200 blockchain developers working on projects per month.
- The Polygon network had about 764 programmers working on it each month in 2022. The growth of the indicator as compared to 2021 was 22%.
According to the report, multiple chain developers (i.e., those working on cross-chain bridges) grew by 240% in 2022. So there were an average of almost 4,000 specialists involved in various DeFi networks every month. As Electric Capital analysts point out, about half of them worked outside of Ethereum.
Development activity in the non-fungible token (NFT) sector also increased. In 2022, over 900 developers worked on code for various NFT collections every month. Compared to 2021, this figure went up by nearly 300%.
Recall that in 2022, the intensity of blockchain development experienced several ups and downs. For instance, at the beginning of the year, following the Terra crash, specialists were actively working on launching a new network instead of conducting a hard fork. In the summer of 2022, Cardano developers increased their performance in anticipation of the Vasil hard fork, while Ethereum specialists worked hard to prepare for the transition to Proof-of-Stake. However, in September 2022, Web3 development activity was already down by 26%.
