Electric Capital has just released their highly anticipated 2024 Crypto Developer Report, offering a fresh perspective on the state of blockchain development worldwide. I dedicated several hours to analysing the report, testing my market assumptions against their findings, and was pleasantly surprised to discover significant alignment between my observations and the empirical data. The regional statistics, in particular, presented some fascinating insights that warrant closer examination.
Developer Report
The Developer Report is a free, open, analysis of open-source contributions in crypto. We analyze over 100M open source code commits to produce these results. Anyone can contribute to our github to help improve the quality of our data.
Assumption 1: Asian power √
Prior to analyzing the data, my hypothesis regarding global blockchain development activity suggested that beyond English-speaking territories, the primary development hubs would be concentrated in India and Spanish-speaking regions - the latter encompassing both Spain and numerous Latin American nations where Spanish serves as the primary language.
According to the comprehensive report, Asia has emerged as the dominant continent in terms of developer distribution, with India playing a pivotal role in this technological shift. The empirical data reveals that India and China collectively command over 15% of the global developer share, ranking second and fourth respectively in the worldwide developer distribution.
Assumption 2: Spanish power ×
Contrary to initial expectations, the Spanish-speaking ecosystem presents an interesting case study. While my observations indicated robust community engagement and high-quality output from Spanish-speaking developers, the data suggests a different reality. Although the Spanish-speaking community may need to enhance its technical development infrastructure, their exceptional prowess in community building and content creation had created a perception bias in my analysis, leading me to overestimate their ranking among global developer communities.
Assumption 3: Base around the world - Partially √
A particularly intriguing aspect warranting investigation is Base. Base is emerging, responsible for 42% of the new code being written in the Ethereum ecosystem, but how is the "Base around the world" doing? Focusing on key emerging markets - Nigeria, India, and Southeast Asia - the data reveals encouraging trends. Base has successfully established itself among the top 3 in both Nigeria and India, demonstrating strong traction. However, Southeast Asia presents a different scenario, with Base yet to achieve top-tier status. This can be attributed to Base's strategic timeline, with 2024 designated as Base expansion year and Base SEA operations intensifying only in Q4 (correct me if I'm wrong). The performance metrics for Southeast Asian developers on the Base platform will be a crucial indicator to monitor in the coming fiscal year.
Some Critics
The primary data source is GitHub repositories and stacks, which may present certain limitations as it may exclude private repositories and closed-source projects such as CEXs, and Opensea (counted as crypto devs in the strict sense). Additionally, some potential data noise may affect the final results, such as temporary spikes in activity from hackathons and similar events, which could impact the overall analysis.
Special thanks to @Kiwinews, @0xbala, and @Kaori for providing the source.
Here's the GitHub page of the sources:
GitHub - electric-capital/crypto-ecosystems: A taxonomy for open source cryptocurrency, blockchain, and decentralized ecosystems
A taxonomy for open source cryptocurrency, blockchain, and decentralized ecosystems - electric-capital/crypto-ecosystems
