The growth of the developer community within an ecosystem is often ignored by analysts, but it is actually one of the most important metrics for gauging the overall health of an ecosystem. During this bear market, while many ecosystems are seeing a significant decline in the number of developers, there is one that stands out for its consistent and organic growth:
Let's take a look at this underestimated but hugely important trend! Context There is often criticism that
https://twitter.com/StarkWareLtd
focuses too much on developers and neglects users. However, it is important to understand that developers are the foundation of any ecosystem. Without developers, there are no interesting dApps, and without interesting dApps, there are no users On the other hand, when a large number of developers are present, interesting dApps emerge, attracting users naturally. This, in turn, increases the TVL and the economic interest of the network, which further attracts more developers. Thus, a virtuous cycle is formed Therefore, having more teams within an ecosystem increases the likelihood of having good dApps on it. That is why ecosystems invest significant amounts of money in onboarding developers through events like hackathons, grants, BD, and other initiatives. Additionally, it is crucial to remember that unlike its competitors, Starknet is not EVM compatible. This means that developers from other ecosystems cannot simply migrate to Starknet by copy pasta their existing projects. Instead, they need to learn how to code in Cairo and completely rewrite their dApps in this new language. This is a significant barrier to entry that StarkWare has attempted to overcome, and they have succeeded Constant and sustained growth The following numbers come from the excellent
https://twitter.com/ElectricCapital
report. Starknet stands out as one of the few ecosystems, and the only one among the top 10 largest ecosystems, to have experienced growth in its number of developers (both full-time and total) over the past year. In contrast, all other ecosystems have seen a decline
To provide some context, the number of developers in the entire crypto market has decreased by 27% over the past year, and here are the figures for other L2s: Polygon: -34% full-time developers, -43% total developers Optimism: -16% full-time developers, -13% total developers Arbitrum: -30% full-time developers, -17% total developers zkSync: -2% full-time developers, +6% total developers On a global scale, it is worth noting that among ecosystems with more than 70 developers, only 6 ecosystems have experienced growth, and Starknet stands out as the ecosystem with the highest number of active developers
Furthermore, Starknet has achieved significant growth over the past two years. While its competitors are mostly losing developers, and others are satisfied with single or double-digit growth rates, Starknet has experienced a huge increase of 622% in the number of full-time developers and 356% in the total number of developers Finally, Starknet is: Globally: the 8th largest ecosystem in terms of full-time developers and the 9th in terms of total developers. Within the Ethereum ecosystem: the 3rd in terms of full-time and total developers (behind Ethereum itself and Polygon). These are huge metrics, especially considering that: Once again, Starknet is not EVM compatible. Starknet is a very young ecosystem, and its programming language only became stable a few months ago. Speaking of programming language, Cairo is the 4th language of the entire market in terms of TVL (which refers to the TVL on dApps built in each programming language)
