Do crypto developers care about bear markets?

The short answer is no. They build despite the market conditions, this year more records have been broken and their resolve looks stronger than ever. Hats off to the Electric Capital team for putting together this well researched report. They’ve been publishing yearly developer reports since 2008, allowing us to keep a track of where crypto developers are going and what they are building. They are true OGs and pioneers when it comes to tracking developer activity in crypto. Less words, more data and a lot of insights. Lets see what the long answer is and what the data tells us.

But first, why devs? why do we track them and what do they tell us?

Developer activity says a lot about the health of an ecosystem. Developers create value by building killer applications that provide value to the end users, which attracts more customers, which again brings in more developers. By tracking developer activity we can find out which ecosystems are creating more value and can be early in catching trends. A majority of successful crypto projects have come out hack-athons ( ex: uniswap & so many more ).

Here are the most interesting things I came across

Open-source cryptography has been around for 14 years now, in the first seven years ( 2008 - 2015 ) there were around 1000 monthly active devs. Since the last seven years ( 2015 - 2022 ) the number has increased to more than 22,000 monthly active devs. Ethereum has a played a huge role in this by creating a more generalised layer for developers to build on which was not possible with bitcoin in the earlier years.

2022

250 million code commits across open-source repositories with 471,000+ monthly code commits
All time high of 61,000+ developers who contributed code for the first time
+5% YoY growth in monthly active developers ( Dec 21 - Dec 22 )
+8% YoY growth in full-time developers. Full time developers contribute 76% of code commits
Number of Bitcoin monthly active devs increased 3x ( 372 - 946 )
Number of Ethereum monthly active devs increased 5x ( 1084 - 5819 )
Number of Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos, & Polygon monthly active devs increased 5x ( 200 - 1000+ )

Outside of Bitcoin & Ethereum

72% of monthly active devs work outside the bitcoin & Ethereum ecosystems
Solana, NEAR, and Polygon grew 40% YoY ( + 500 monthly active devs )
Sui, Aptos, Starknet, Mina, Osmosis, Hedera, Optimism, and Arbitrum grew 50%+ YoY ( + 100 monthly active devs )

Categories

DeFi:
+3901 monthly active devs ( +240% since May 2020 )
50% DeFi developers are outside of Ethereum
NFT:
+900 monthly active devs ( +299% since May 2021 )

Some interesting charts and what I make of it: