The ranks of cryptocurrency developers held steady in 2024, as some recent entrants left the industry while veterans mostly stuck around, according to a report released Thursday by Electric Capital.
The total developers working in crypto worldwide was basically flat, declining a statistically insignificant 7% from a year earlier, and the number of monthly active developers went to 23,613 in November, the report said.
Meanwhile, the Solana ecosystem, ground zero for the memecoin craze, was the most popular blockchain among new developers, an 83% increase in its ecosystem compared to a year earlier. In July, this community became the first since 2016 to bring on board more devs than Ethereum. Solana attracted 7,625 new developers in 2024, the most of any chain and a little over 1,000 more than Ethereum.
The results underscore the challenge Ethereum faces as rival smart contract platform Solana’s low fees and fast transactions attract investment and talent.
According to Maria Shen, a general partner at Electric Capital, the share of developers who have worked in crypto for more than two years grew in 2024. Among those who left the industry, the largest group were relative newcomers.
“These are people who effectively joined during the bear market, and haven’t really seen anything since then,” Shen told CoinDesk in an interview.
The stability of the developer population is an auspicious sign, Shen said.
“When we look at the sector of established developers, it’s growing and looking very healthy,” she said. “When we look at full-time developers .. this had the least amount of declines, very small, like [a] 4% decline year over year. So overall, I would say, [the population is] looking very healthy, but it’s flat, and mainly because of the losses from people who joined less than a year ago and then less than two years ago.”
Solana has momentum, Ethereum remains dominant
Despite Solana’s momentum and massive increase in new developer talent, its main competitor, Ethereum, is still ahead.
“Ethereum absolutely dominates,” said Shen “Ethereum has very, very deep network effects, and you can see that through the data.”
The number of monthly Ethereum developers shrank by 17% over the last year, to 6,244, but Shen said this blockchain still has the biggest developer ecosystem by far.
“Ethereum dominates by overall developers everywhere, in every continent of the world. But Solana is currently number two,” Shen said.
Growth in Ethereum development can mainly be attributed to the vast number of layer-2 networks that have popped up, with Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum seeing many developers working on their chains. Slightly more than half – 56% – of Ethereum developers are working on the layer-2s on top of it, Electric Capital found.
Furthermore, Eigenlayer, the main restaking protocol on Ethereum, brought in a period of massive developer innovation for its ecosystem as protocols deployed their Actively Validated Services (AVS) in the ecosystem. Eigenlayer was the fastest growing developer ecosystem in 2024, with a 167% increase by monthly overall developers, the report said.
Developers are global
Electric Capital’s report also showed that crypto is becoming more global, as Asia became the continent with the biggest number of blockchain developers, and North America dropped from first place to third. However, the U.S. remains the number one country for now for developers, with a 19% share.
India, however, brought on board more new crypto developers in 2024 than any other country, with 17% of the new developer share.
“Anecdotally, there’s a lot of education programs and developer education programs, there’s a lot of hackathons in India,” Shen said.
The geographic diversification of developers is another salubrious trend, Shen said.
“The idea that the U.S. and North America continues its dominance is not only unlikely, but I would say, kind of undesirable,” she said. “You do want to see more global diversity in crypto, and to be borderless, and I think there’s a lot of great engineering talent outside of the U.S.”