2023 Crypto Developer Report

Date: Jan 17, 2024

We fingerprinted 485 million code commits across 818k open-source repositories to create this year's Developer Report

Why measure developers: Developers are a leading indicator of value creation.

Developers build apps that deliver value to users. Killer apps attract customers. New customers bring more developers.

Because crypto is significantly open source, we have an unprecedented ability to measure this developer-value creation flywheel in an emerging industry.

Executive Summary

  1. While developers overall are down 24%, the most valuable segment of developers (2+ year tenure who contribute the most code) continues to steadily grow.
    • Developers who have been in crypto for 2+ years are at an all-time high after growing at 52% annualized for the past 5 years.
    • Developers who have been in crypto for more than 1 year grew 16% YoY and are 63% of all monthly active developers.
    • In contrast, Newcomers who have been in crypto for less than 12 months dropped -52% YoY.
    • Overall developer number losses can be attributed to a record number of new developers who joined in 2022 and churned.
  2. Crypto is now clearly Multi-chain.
    • 30% of developers support more than one chain, up 10x from 3% in 2015.
    • Developers who support 3+ chains grew to 17% of all developers in 2023, an all-time high.
    • Growth in developers is not correlated across projects. Some projects gained developers while others lost them. Developers are voting with their feet on which projects they believe provide real utility.
  3. Crypto is global. The US continues to lose developer share.
    • 72% of developers are outside of North America.
    • The US has lost -14% developer share since 2018 and is now only 26% of crypto developers.
    • South Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Africa, and Southern Europe collectively grew developer share by +20% since 2018.

Tracking the Crypto Developer Community is an Open-Source Effort

Finding, tracking, and mapping these crypto repositories is a community effort. Thank you to the 500+ contributors who added repositories to the Crypto Ecosystems Github since 2019. If you are working in open-source crypto, please help the community by adding your repo to the mapping.h

Questions?

Devreport@electriccapital.com

Disclaimer and Disclosures

This Content is for Informational Purposes Only

Any content included in this report is informational only and not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell securities or pursue any particular investment strategy, and does not constitute the provision of investment advice. Electric Capital Partners, LLC (together with its affiliates, “Electric Capital”) does not provide advice of any kind through this report, its website, or social media posts. Information in this report or any posts may not be used or relied upon in evaluating the merits of any investment.

You should consult your own advisers as to business, financial, tax, legal, or other related matters concerning any investment.

Certain information has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Electric Capital. Content is as of the date posted and subject to change without notice.

Electric Capital makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of this information, or its appropriateness for a given scenario.

Electric Capital may have previously held, currently holds, or will in the future hold token or equity interests in one or more of the ecosystems or projects mentioned in this report. A non-exhaustive list of past and present investments made by vehiclesfunds managed by Electric Capital is available here. Excluded from this list are investments (and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies or other digital assets) for which the issuer has not provided permission for Electric Capital to disclose publicly. Electric Capital does not short tokens.

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