The Ethereum ecosystem still has far more developers than competing networks, but they are catching up at a faster rate of growth.
Ethereum competitors like Polkadot, Solana and Binance Smart Chain are growing faster in terms of development activities, according to crypto research firm Electric Capital, which published its findings on the blockchain development ecosystem in a new one report on Jan. 6.
It showed that more than 4,000 monthly active open source developers are working on Ethereum – significantly more than the 680 who work in the Bitcoin network. Across all chains, the total number of measured monthly active developers was more than 18,400 and the record for the number of code commits by new developers in 2021 was broken at more than 34,000.
The measurements were obtained by analyzing around 500,000 code repositories and 160 million code commits, which are changes or updates to the code. The report found that Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin are the five largest developer ecosystems overall.
According to the report, Polkadot has around 1,500 developers in total, while Cosmos and Solana are around a thousand each.
Other active ecosystems in terms of monthly developers were Cosmos, near that launched an $ 800 million developer fund in October, Tezos, Polygon and Cardano each with 250+ active monthly developers.
While Ethereum is still dominant – more than 20% of new Web3 developers have joined its ecosystem – competing networks have seen stronger growth.
“Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche and Terra are growing faster than Ethereum at similar times in its history.”Growth in ecosystem development since the first commit – Electric Capital
The report compared the average monthly active developers between December 2020 and December 2021 and found that Solana grew 4.9 times, NEAR had a 4 times growth rate, and Polygon’s monthly developers more than doubled. Cosmos saw average monthly active developers grow by 70% and BSC by 80% over the course of 2021.
While the development growth numbers for early-stage projects are impressive, Ethereum is still king. The ecosystem continues to have the largest network of tools, dapps, and logs, and is 2.8 times larger than its closest rival, Polkadot.
Related: “We are 50% on the way there,” says Vitalik about the development of Ethereum
Solana, Avalanche, BSC, NEAR and Terra have evolved into DeFi hubs in the last year. attract more developers as adoption increases. The number of monthly active DeFi full-time employees increased by 64%, and more than 500 new developers contributed code to a DeFi project every month except January.
