How Many Developers Are Working in the Crypto Industry?
Developer communities in the blockchain industry continued to grow in 2022 amid the bear market.
Electric Capital’s fourth annual developer report was released with an in-depth analysis of the cryptocurrency developer community. The report analyzed over 250 million code commits and sought input from over 300 individuals.
Commits is an operation that sends the latest changes to the source code to the repository, and these changes become part of the repository’s master commit.
Although the crypto community has faced one of the most intense years in the industry, in which prices dropped by an average of 70%, the developer community grew by 5%, according to the report.
Ethereum boasts the largest developer community with a total of over 5,000 developers. Many other developer communities exceed 500 developers, while developers on various blockchains also continue to grow. Bitcoin, in contrast, has around 900 active monthly developers.
Highlights of the report:
- Monthly developers grew 5% year-over-year
- Over 23,000 monthly developers on average
- Over 100,000 developers have worked on crypto since 2021
- Average over 471,000 monthly commits of code
- Average of 3,900 monthly developers, particularly in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space
- 61,000 new developers entered crypto in 2022.
Overall growth in 2022 is slower than the bull market in 2020 and 2021. However, the growth was consistent with previous bear markets, lending credence to the concept of crypto market cycles.
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For a full review of the report, see the Twitter thread by Electric Capital investment lead Maria Shen.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
