Starknet and zkSync buck trend as crypto ecosystems shed devs by 28%

October 19, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Monthly active developers across the crypto ecosystem fell 28% year-on-year in October, though some have managed to buck the trend.

Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions Starknet and zkSync are among the few platforms to have increased their total monthly active developer counts over the last 12 months, data shows.

While Starknet and zkSync only recorded increases of 3% and 6% respectively, the likes of Ethereum, Polygon and Solana saw their counts fa by 23%, 43% and 57% respectively over the same timeframe, according to an updated developer report by Electric Capital, which provided data up to Oct. 1.

Total monthly active developers fell 27.7% from 26,701 developers to 19,279, reflecting a wider downward trend in developers over the last 12 months.

*Monthly active developers in the cryptocurrency ecosystem since 2015. Source: Electric Capital*

Chainlink, Stellar, Aztec Protocol and Ripple also increased their developer counts as of Oct. 1, though their total monthly active developers were lower than zkSync and Starknet.

StarkWare’s Starknet and Matter Labs’ zkSync are layer 2 solutions aimed at scaling Ethereum through zero-knowledge rollups, which have become a focal point in 2023.

Much of Starknet’s focus of late has revolved around its “Quantum Leap” — which went live in July. It can theoretically increase Ethereum’s TPS (transactions per second) from around 13-15 to 37 TPS consistently and up to 90 TPS in some cases.

Starknet and zkSync have also been working on zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) solutions to further scale Ethereum throughout 2023.

Developers at zkSync have also been building a network of “Hyperchains” to create an ecosystem of interoperable protocols and sovereign chains as part of its zero-knowledge tech stack. The firm unveiled the solution in June and hope to have a working version of it by end of 2023.

In a thread on X on Oct. 18, Electric Capital software engineer Enrique Herreros noted many of the departing active monthly developers were “newcomers” (less than one year), while the more “established” (more than two years) and “emerging” (one to two years) developers have remained relatively steady over the last 12 months:

“We can see a decrease of -58% in Newcomers, a moderate increase of +11% Emerging Developers and a slight increase of +5% Established Developers,” Enrique said.

.@electriccapital’s Developer October Update is here! This is a lighter weight update as we prepare for our annual report.

We inspected 164M+ crypto commits to find:
• 19.3K monthly active open source developers as of October 1, 2023
• Developers have decreased -27% YoY
•… pic.twitter.com/bHyMHx29El
— Enrique ⚡ (@eherrerosj) October 18, 2023

Enrique noted this is a cyclical trend where newcomers dominate the developer market during bull markets but then fall in numbers when prices begin to plummet.

Electric Capital typically obtains its data from code repos and code commits on open-source developer platform GitHub.

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Number of devs increased during crypto winter: Electric Capital report

January 18, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Closed-Source

Ethereum continues to be the dominant blockchain for developer activity, however, a few other chains continued to make ground.

The notion that bear markets are good for builders appears to be true with the total number of monthly active Web3 developers increasing 5.4% to more than 23,300 over the last 12 months despite a near 70% drop in crypto prices.

According to a Jan. 16 report from Electric Capital, “full-time” developers — categorized as those who contribute to 76% of Github commits — also increased 15.2% to over 7000, while “one-time” builders fell 6.2% to over 3,500 during the same time period between December 2021 and December 2022

Despite the crypto market capitalization beginning its long plunge from from its all-time high (ATH) of $2.9 trillion in Nov. 2021, monthly developer activity only began to fall in Jun. 2022 after the metric reached its record high of nearly 26,500.

This fall was partly attributed to the fall in developer activity in the Terra ecosystem following its catastrophic collapse in May. 2022.

*Monthly active developer count over time compared to crypto’s market capitalization. Source:* *Electric Capital.*

The next three months from June to September saw a 26% fall in weekly active Web3 developers.

2022 did however see 61,127 new Web3 developers come into the industry — the most ever recorded and a 25.8% increase from 2021.

In fact, more new Web3 developers deployed their first line of open-source crypto code in the past year (109,723) than between 2014 and 2020 (101,054).

*Monthly active developer count since Bitcoin was launched compared to when Ethereum and its smart contract functionalities were introduced. Source:* *Electric Capital.*

Ethereum continues to dominate developer activity, having increased its full-time developer count by 9% to 1,873 — which is more than the next three highest ecosystems combined — Polkadot (752), Cosmos (511) and Solana (383).

Developer counts on non-Ethereum chains are catching up though. The Cosmos and Solana networks increased 34% and 36% respectively, while Starknet is among one of the mid-sized ecosystems to have made a solid run in 2022 with a 214% increase in developer count.

The report also found that following Terra’s collapse only 28 (9%) of the original Terra developers stuck around for Terra 2.0 while 143 developers (42%) called it quits and migrated to other ecosystems.

Many of the former Terra developers migrated to Cosmos, 42 of 143, the most of any other ecosystem.

*The number of full-time developers from each ecosystem since their launch date. Source:* *Electric Capital.*

Electric Capital explained there are many more Web3 developers than accounted for in the report as some projects are close-sourced.

Number of DAOs increases 8X along with spike in votes and proposals

June 10, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The total number of DAOs has increased dramatically over the past 12 months along with their participation rates, but it may not mean decentralized governance is catching on.

The total number of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), the number of governance proposals put forward, and the number of votes cast, have all seen astounding 8X growth over the past 12 months.

Data compiled by Snapshot Labs, shared by Electric Capital Engineer Emre Caliskan in a June 9 tweet, highlighted that DAO numbers have increased by 8.8X, from 700 in May 2021 to 6,000 now. The number of proposals has increased by 8.5X, and the number of total votes have increased by 8.3X over the past 12 months, from 448,000 to 3.7 million.

1/ DAO governance activity is exploding . In the last year, we have seen:

• 8.8x in # of DAOs
• 8.5x in # of proposals
• 8.3x in # of votes

Here are 10+ key insights from @SnapshotLabs data on DAO governance pic.twitter.com/45KAOeER5y
— Emre ⚡ (@n4motto) June 8, 2022

Snapshot is a decentralized governance participation portal where DAO members can propose new initiatives and vote on them, the data was compiled in collaboration with Electric Capital, a Web3 investment firm

While the findings look promising for decentralized governance models, the increase in participation was driven by just a small handful of the most active DAOs. New proposals mostly came from just 10% of DAOs, while 60% of DAOs havhad three or fewer proposals since their inception.

Nevertheless, the overall growth is an impressive show of confidence in the DAO structure.

Rival DAO tracking tool DeepDAO has slightly different figures and shows there are only 4,833 DAOS as of June 10.

Caliskan attributed the increase in new proposals to the popularity and wide coverage of Constitution DAO. It was an organization set up last November with the intent of buying an original copy of the US Constitution. The DAO was outbid at the last moment, but it proved the power such organizations can have.

Most DAO proposals come from just 10% of organizations.

According to DeepDAO, PancakeSwap and Decentraland are the two top DAOs by proposal count with 3,300 and 1,200 respectively. Only the top 72 organizations have at least 100 proposals as of the time of writing.

Despite the overall promising numbers in DAO growth, a June 7 draft bill from the US Senate could curtail their growth if no changes are made to it. It initially calls for all crypto projects to register with the government and reveal the identities of their users and founders.

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Electric Capital

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