Web3 Developers: Who and Where They Are?

Blockchain technology has seen a surge in interest and mass adoption in recent years, nailing the new highs in 2022–2023. Several Ethereum upgrades, the launch of Uniswap’s mobile wallet, Sui’s blockchain, and a whole universe of news and updates — the blockchain sphere is developing at an enormous speed. But who’s staying behind all of these technological movements? The answer is clear — they are web3/crypto developers.

In today’s market, the demand for web3 developers is sky-high. According to the 2023 State of Crypto report by a16z, the number of active GitHub developers (those who have committed to or forked a public repository during the month) has seen a steady increase of over 60% in the last 3 years:

The development activity is becoming a critical factor to consider when assessing the potential of a crypto project. More and more investors are looking at this kind of data before making their investment decisions — how many active developers the project has, how many commits have been made, and whether these numbers are growing with time. Fortunately, GitHub provides an easy way to analyze the performance of crypto projects and their contributors. And we already did that!

Contora.ai and Prog.ai have collaborated to come up with the most insightful analysis on blockchain developers. With the help of Contora’s Web3 Database and GitHub development activity data, as well as Prog’s in-depth source code analysis and deep contributors’ profiles, we have created a complete picture of the web3 developers’ landscape in 2023. This analysis provides a detailed understanding of who these developers are, what they are working on, how actively, and where they are located.

Methodology

We are aware of the brilliant Developers Report made by Electric Capital, but in our research, we looked at the developers’ data from different perspectives.

We’ve analyzed only the top 2,000 alive crypto projects by liquidity, meaning that we considered only projects with tradeable coins/tokens. We got 41,978 developers in total for our research. Then, each developer profile was enriched with more data points from sources like LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on, with the primary goal of creating a united developer digital profile from the deep web. Let’s explore our findings.

Development activity

To begin with, let’s take a look at the top projects by development activity (number of active contributors and commits) in April:

Polkadot ($DOT), Ethereum ($ETH), and Cardano ($ADA) are leading the blockchain development scene with the highest number of active GitHub contributors and commits as of April 2023. With the growing demand for web3 devs, these and other projects are positioned to attract more developers and stay ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and growth.

Skills and programming languages

From each contributor’s profile, we inferred skills based on their commits and projects. The charts below show the most common skills and programming languages across the top 40K web3 developers:

Developers geographical location

In 2018, nearly 40% of all crypto developers were based in the United States, whereas in 2022, this figure had fallen to the 30% level. a16z cited lack of regulatory clarity as a possible reason for the decline in its summary, stating, “There has been much debate, but little regulatory clarity, which has hindered web3’s growth. As a result, America’s edge may be slipping.”

Let’s take a look at the most popular locations for developers. Here are the top countries they are based in as of May 2023:

🇺🇸 United States — 18%
🇩🇪 Germany — 3.32%
🇨🇳 China — 3.23%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom — 3.16%
🇨🇦 Canada — 2.41%
🇮🇳 India — 2.2%
🇫🇷 France — 1.81%
🌍 Other countries — 32.67%
❌ Unknown — 36.2%

Below is the same top by countries, but for the top 10 crypto assets by liquidity:

🇺🇸 United States — 23%
🇩🇪 Germany — 5.2%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom — 4.3%
🇨🇦 Canada — 3%
🇮🇳 India — 3%
🇨🇳 China — 2.7%
🇫🇷 France — 2.4%
🌍 Other countries — 26.4%
❌ Unknown — 30%

The statistics show that the United States is still the most popular country for blockchain developers, with 18% of all developers located there. Other countries like Germany and China are also seeing growth in their builders’ communities. Still, the distribution around the world is up in the air, with regulatory landscapes playing a role in shaping where they could end up. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming years and where the blockchain community will thrive next.

Seniority level

Perhaps the most interesting part of our research. We analyzed the number and source code of commits, the number of owned repositories and their popularity, years of working experience, and sorted web3 developers by their expertise into 4 buckets — Junior, Middle, Senior, and Rock Star. The Rock Stars are those who have years of working experience and successfully created several popular open-source repositories.

The seniority level of web3 developers looks like this:

👴🏻 Senior — 35.3%
👨🏻 Middle — 26.8%
🤩 Rock Star — 25%
🧑🏻‍🎓 Junior — 12.5%
❌ Unknown — 0.4%

And here’s the seniority level of developers for the top 10 coins by liquidity:

👴🏻 Senior — 36.1%
🤩 Rock Star — 35.5%
👨🏻 Middle — 17.7%
🧑🏻‍🎓 Junior — 9.4%
❌ Unknown — 1.3%

Generally speaking, the seniority level of blockchain developers can be considered as high, with 61% of contributors being either Senior or Rock Star developers. Still, there’s a lot of space for newcomers — the web3 sphere is welcoming Middle and Junior developers. However, the top 10 coins by liquidity seem to be more strict to the developers’ expertise, with 71.6% of Rock Star and Senior developers, and Juniors making up only 9.4%.

Developer’s Activity

Now we have a good understanding of where blockchain developers are located and what projects they are working on, now it’s time to explore how actively they are developing:

• 2.6 — Average number of projects one contributor is working on
• 190.4 — Average number of commits one contributor made
• 41 — Average number of commits one contributor made per project (repository)

The chart below shows the average number of commits per month made by Rock Star, Senior, Middle, and Junior developers. It is interesting that the higher level of developer expertise results in a higher number of commits made.

Speaking about which countries have the most active developers, here are the top countries by the monthly number of commits made by developers from there:

🇭🇺 Hungary — 212.6
🇱🇷 Liberia — 141.4
🇯🇲 Jamaica — 102.6
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka — 99.8
🇳🇱 Netherlands — 83.3
🇯🇴 Jordan — 80.4
🇷🇴 Romania — 74.2
🇨🇾 Cyprus — 54.1
🇭🇰 Hong Kong — 53.3
🇨🇮 Côte d’Ivoire — 50.1
🇲🇪 Montenegro — 49
🇿🇦 South Africa — 44.4
🇷🇸 Serbia — 38.9
🇧🇾 Belarus — 38
🇮🇪 Ireland — 35
🇵🇱 Poland — 34.3
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands — 33.3
🇨🇭Switzerland — 32.8
🇸🇮 Slovenia — 32.8
🇩🇪 Germany — 32.3
🇧🇸 Bahamas — 32.00
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic — 31.9
🇺🇸 United States — 31.2

The results here are a bit controversial, but our findings suggest that contributors from developing countries tend to show higher levels of engagement and activity compared to their counterparts from developed countries. It is important to note that this is a general trend, and there are always exceptions to the rule.

Summing it up, the blockchain and web3 landscape is experiencing unprecedented growth, attracting an increasingly diverse and skilled developer community. Some key takeaways:

• The United States remains the leading hub for these developers, despite the regulatory issues.
• Web3 developers for the top 2,000 coins/tokens by liquidity have a high expertise level, with 61% being Senior or Rock Star contributors.
• The level of development activity varies, with developers from developing countries tending to be more active and involved.
• Despite the unknown location of some developers, we see that regulatory clarity plays a significant role in determining where developers choose to work
• The average number of commits made by developers increases with the level of expertise, indicating that higher-level developers are generally more active.

We hope everyone enjoyed today’s analysis and insights, we’ve put a lot of effort into collecting and analyzing the data. Share your interest by leaving 1000 claps 👏 here and we will post another analysis! You can actually hold down the clap button all the way until 50 claps :)

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P.S. Contora.ai is an alternative data provider for the crypto industry and institutional crypto trading. Contact us to discover more of our crypto datasets for your quantitative strategies.
Prog.ai provides deep analysis of GitHub data and helps recruiters find their best candidates, contact us if you want to hire a Rock Star web3 developer.