Why Blockchain Developer Tooling Matters

When I evaluate a blockchain project as an investment for myself or as an advisor, the first thing I do is take a look at their developer tools/documentation. Most people would probably look at their market cap or google project xyz plus the word scam. This is not a bad idea either. Why do I do this? It is part of my investment thesis.
One of my criteria for investing in crypto projects is that they must have developer documentation and tooling that is consistent with maturity of the platform.
For example, if a project has been live for a year and there is very little information on how to develop on it — that is a red flag. If a project just finished its ICO and does not have a main net up, I have less expectation on their developer program.
What is Developer Tooling
I would define developer tooling as anything that enables a developer to interact or create something with your software. Some examples of this are:
- Documentation with full examples a downloadable projects
- An active developer forum(Stack overflow, telegram, github)
- A Command Line Interface(CLI)
- A client library(node, python, etc)
- A testnet & faucet
- Ability to run a chain locally via Docker or other means
Why does this matter
From a speculative point of view, it is possible to just go with common sentiment and invest with the crowd, however, I firmly believe the following to be true:
Developers are the first adopters
- If you do not have adequate developer tooling on your platform, you will not be able to attract good developers to your product.
- If you do not have good developers on your platform, you won’t have decent products built.
- If you don’t have decent products, you won’t have user adoption of your chain.
OR
Developer Tooling = Developer Adoption = Applications = User Adoption
Bonus: I have found that good developers increase the security and stability of any software product — especially in the open source world.
An Example
I started developing iOS and Android apps back when the platforms were just getting started. Apple and Google both had somewhat decent developer documentation and really benefitted from it. Apple was one of the first software companies to give independent developers a platform to create and distribute their apps to the world. They allowed us to have equal footing with enterprise companies and I believe a large part of their AppStore success was due to their focus on developer tooling and support from the beginning. Blackberry and other handsets suffered from a multitude of problems along with bad timing, but I can attest that one of those problems was crappy developer resources.
Project Observations
Ethereum
Obviously, ethereum has a significant first-mover advantage in the market, but they also have fantastic documentation and tooling for being such a young project. I have written extensively about this chain, but my sweetening up your ethereum environment can give you an idea of how mature the options are.
EOS
eosio has decent documentation and developer tooling considering that they have only been live for several months. Their eosjs library and cleos CLI are rapidly evolving as are the products being built on it. A good starter article using EOS developer tooling is here.
Cardano
Cardano Foundation is an interesting case because an enormous amount of work is being done on the platform by very smart people but you must really dig to find and use the developer tooling. I would think that a project with this much invested would invest more in developer adoption and visibility to the community. I invested some time in understanding Cardano’s smart contract platforms here.
Todo
I have left out some really big names such as NEO, NEM Official (Editors), Lisk, Tezos, Stellar, etc. I really want to do deep dives on these platforms as well when I have time. Let me know if you would like to partner on a walkthrough of your developer ecosystem.
Summary
Blockchain companies are no different than any other software company in many respects. Software needs good developers, quality assurance, support, and an ecosystem to thrive. There are project owners that are sitting on tens of millions of dollars that have never written a single readme doc in their life. It is crucial that these capitalized projects build out their developer tools in tandem with their project just like Apple did on their platform. Remember…
Developer Tooling = Developer Adoption = Applications = User Adoption

