Electric Capital Developer Report (H2 2018)

UPDATED: The H1 2019 (data through June 2019) report is available at https://medium.com/@ElectricCapital/electric-capital-developer-report-h1-2019-7d836d68fecb

We fingerprinted 20,000+ code repos and 16M commits to create this Q1 2019 Dev Report. We are excited to introduce this as the first of a series of reports that dig in to where crypto developers are focused.

This report focuses on developer activity from Jan, 2018 to Feb, 2019.

Download the report

Executive Summary

• The number of developers working on public coins has doubled in the last 2 years. 4k+ developers/month contribute code across 2.8k public coins. This is undercounting the number of developers in the crypto ecosystem; some of the most active projects are private (e.g. BNB), un-launched (e.g. Coda), or not a coin (e.g. Lightning).
• Developers who entered the crypto ecosystem have continued to build despite market conditions. From Jan 2018 to Jan 2019, the number of monthly active developers fell 4% while the markets fell more than 80%.
• Ethereum has the biggest developer team in crypto. On average, 216 developers contribute code every month to Ethereum’s repos. This is undercounting the number of Ethereum developers since we do not include ecosystem projects like Truffle.
• Bitcoin’s developer ecosystem is very healthy 10 years after launch. On average, more than 50 developers per month contribute to Bitcoin’s repos. This is undercounting the number of Bitcoin developers since we do not include ecosystem projects like wallets.
• Many projects who are being abandoned by developers are forks of high network value coins. Dogecoin has no developers for consecutive months; Litecoin fell from 40 monthly developers to 3 developers in the last year; and forks like Bitcoin Diamond and Bitcoin Gold have had fewer than 5 developers a month since October, 2018.
• In only looking at contributors to core protocol (excluding those who contribute code updates to the website, documentation, etc.), Ethereum is by far the most active at 99 monthly developers on average.
• In general, many developers are working on core protocol for platforms. Besides Ethereum, other big platforms (EOS, Cardano, TRON) all have over 25+ monthly core protocol developers on average.

Code contribution analysis is nuanced and we know this is imperfect. We welcome any feedback or comments on this report. Please do let us know how we can improve our data and analysis.

Contact: Maria Shen — info@electriccapital.com

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