How Many New Developers Joined Web3 in 2021? More Than 34,000

This week, Electric Capital released its 2021 developer report on the developer ecosystems in crypto — and it shows that interest in Web3 is growing by leaps and bounds.

While prices may be down this week, that is likely no matter to these developers. As The New York Times noted in a recent article, executives and employees at Google, Meta, Amazon, and other big tech companies are leaving to join crypto start-ups or work in Web3. (Disclosure: I write a Bulletin newsletter for Meta.)

And the Electric Capital report shows how attractive crypto is to developers: currently, more than 18,000 developers commit code monthly in open source crypto and Web3 projects — up 75% over last year. And more than 34,000 new developers committed such code in 2021.

As she said on my podcast, Unchained, “A really important caveat here is that all the data we look at is open source developers, so this obviously does not include closed source developers. So, for people working at Coinbase or a lot of the exchanges or for a lot of games that are closed source, that’s not counted in these numbers. So these numbers are really an undercounting of the number of developers that are in the Web3 space now.”

When asked why the number of new developers jumped so much in 2021, Shen says, “once…