Over 16,000 new developers have joined the Ethereum ecosystem from January to September this year, according to the Ethereum Foundation, referencing data from Electric Capital.
Solana ranks second in attracting new developers, with over 11,500 coding for its ecosystem; however, a representative from the Solana Foundation indicated that this data might be outdated.
In addition, Bitcoin welcomed nearly 7,500 new developers.
This positions the Ethereum ecosystem as the largest active developer base across all blockchain projects, totaling 31,869 developers. In comparison, Solana has the second largest with 17,708 developers, while Bitcoin has 11,036 developers.
It is important to note that the data for Ethereum encompasses both the Ethereum layer-1 network and various layer-2 networks, as defined by L2Beat, including Arbitrum, Unichain, Optimism, and others, while avoiding double-counting developers who are involved in multiple networks within the ecosystem.
Notable Growth for Solana
While Ethereum continues to lead, its full-time developers have experienced a modest growth of just 5.8% in the past year and 6.3% over the last two years.
In contrast, Solana has witnessed a substantial increase of 29.1% over the past year and an impressive 61.7% over the last two years, according to a developer tracker from Electric Capital.
Unaccounted Developers on Solana
However, Jacob Creech, head of developer relations at Solana Foundation, stated that Electric Capital’s data underrepresents the number of developers on Solana by around 7,800.
Creech has urged developers to share their GitHub repositories for accurate tracking by Solana’s crawlers that monitor Solana-related activity on GitHub.
There have also been concerns regarding the data, as some chains were combined while others were left out, even though they all function on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
“EVM chains should be grouped together. Developers on Polygon and BNB can primarily leverage the same skills and EVM tools,” remarked Nethermind founder Tomasz K. Stańczak said.
Related: Sorare CEO remains optimistic about Ethereum despite ‘upgrading’ to Solana
Cointelegraph has reached out to Electric Capital for comments, but no response was received at the time of publication.
Potential AI Impact on Developer Count
Meanwhile, Jarrod Watts, head of Australia for layer-2 network Abstract, has expressed doubts about the influx of new developers in the space, suggesting that AI-generated code and hackathon repositories may be inflating the numbers.
“In my opinion, this data likely includes a lot of low-quality coding and hackathon projects that are never revisited… I can’t recall any new crypto developer that started this year,” said Watts.
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