Developer Report Deepdive | Maria Shen - Electric Capital

Capal she' be doing a deep dive on their developer report so let's give Maria a warm Round of Applause hey everyone um thank you so much for coming so today I'm going to talk about the developer report um what the developer report does is it looks across all open-source repositories contributing to crypto to understand the number of Open Source developers that are working in the space um first of all why are open source developers important um crypto is a very unique industry at its peak a three trillion doll industry that has um unprecedented sort of transparency into who is how many people are working on it what are they working on um what are their contribution patterns and that's because crypto is very uniquely open source Bitcoin started as open source ethereum is open source some of the most important projects are open source and so we look at all of the commits across the open source crypto space and compile it every year into something called the developer report which you can also find on developer report.com but without further Ado I'll just go through some of the numbers with you today we have a lot of charts to go through so um this is a very numbers forward presentation so as of the last uh December 2023 we have 22,000 41 monthly active developers working in crypto um again this is only open source so it doesn't include coinbase developers it doesn't include a lot of game developers anyone working in closed Source would not be part of this number so it's an under counting of the number of developers in the space monthly active developers fell by 24% if you look year-over-year between December 2022 and December 2023 but what's really interesting and this is a chart that I really like is if you segment these developers by how long they've been working in crypto it suddenly becomes very clear that the developers who have been working in crypto for more than a year are growing steadily and so that's this dark blue and medium blue area of the chart right here um and in fact experienced devs so again devs who have been contributing to crypto for more than a year grew by 16% in 2023 and why do we care about these experience devs well it's because they contribute more code 75% of code contributions are created by developers who have been in crypto for over a year and developers who are working in crypto for over a year commit consistently more than newcomers the dark blue line uh so this Maps the number of average monthly commits by developers um a established developer so Developers who have been working for two plus years uh has the highest average and a newcomer so someone who's been in crypto for less than a year averages around 13 commits a month um and if you look at the number of established developers so developers who have been in crypto for over two years that has actually grown at a 52% annualized rate um since 2018 and I think for me I I look at a lot of this data and I've been in crypto since 2018 I think this really resonates with how I feel about crypto overall which is that despite um you know despite bare markets or bull markets um it feels like there is a core group of people that continues to push crypto forward and I think what's really fascinating here is that you can see that these developers who have been in crypto for two plus years are growing steadily and are completely uncorrelated with prices um and the developer lost that we saw so the so the decline by 24% uh monthly active developers almost all came from newcomers because newcomers um aka the developers who have been in crypto for less than a year fell by 52% over the last year so why did the number of newcomers uh newcomer developers rise and fall this graphs the number of new people who join crypto every single year so in 2023 we had 47,000 over 47,000 new developers contribute to open- Source crypto for the first time and if you break these newcomer numbers down on a monthly basis um and you look at it alongside Network value so that is the um the aggregate market prices of crypto you can see that um generally speaking newcomers more newcomers come when prices appreciate and fewer newcomers come when prices fall I think that's not shocking to everyone but I think what is really amazing and encouraging is that just because prices are lower doesn't mean newcomers stop coming um and in fact when you see this enormous uh dip from 2021 that I think probably a lot of us felt when prices fell over 90% um we still had thousands of new developers joining crypto and contributing to crypto for the first time during these Market lows and not only that but the developers who were joining during the these Market lows was actually higher than the 2018 numbers at its peak um and so crypto has really grown a lot in size over time um newcomers account for most of the 2023 developer losses and uh more developers joined in this bare Market than even in the last bare market so when newcomers come into crypto what are they where did they land um this is a breakdown of the number of newcomers by ecosystem in 2023 by far ethereum is the biggest draw for new developers um 16,000 more than 16,000 newcomers wrote code for ethereum in 2023 and that's 2.7x more than the next largest ecosystem which is polygon um so the you know so polygon had over 6,000 new Developers contribute code salana had over 4,000 new developers contribute code B&B had 3,000 cosmos had over 3,000 um and we see a lot of familiar names kind of coming down this line and there's a large torso 17 ecosystems with over a thousand new developers from 2023 and again this was um you know really in the depth of a bare Market as well and newcomers are actually supporting multiple chains so if you add across all of these numbers you actually get more than the number of newcomers and it's because developers are no longer just working on one chain they're working across different ecosystems um so let's look at the number of multi-chain developers 34% of all developers in 2023 built for multiple chains so more than one chain and 88.2% actually supported five or more chains and the number of multi-chain developers have 10x since 2015 with most of that growth happening after 2018 um so between 2018 and 2021 we saw 125% growth in the number of multi-chain developers um and what's really cool is the share of multi so there's about um 30% of developers today are uh again 30% of of monthly open source developers today work on more than one chain and that's been holding very steady for the past 3 years and so this is not a this multi-chain trend is is not something that's going away and seems to have sticking power all right so we can look at which chains developers have in common um one way to do that is to draw a line between ecosystems when they have developers in common um what's really crazy is if you look at 2018 um the ecosystem looked pretty simple there was Bitcoin who shared developers with lightning Bitcoin cash stacks um and then there was kind of this ethereum cluster who shared developers with polka dot and Cosmos um 2020 was a little bit more complicated in 2013 we have something truly very complex happening and so taking a closer look at 2023 um who shares developers with another chain during 2023 so the thicker the line the more developers uh they share and so just to call out some of these things um you see a very thick line between Cosmos and osmosis so strong developer overlap here uh strong overlap between ethereum and polygon and then there are some um some islands like cardano or xrp who don't share sign significant numbers of developers with other ecosystems ethereum shares the most number of developers with any other chain I don't think that's surprising um it shares the most developers with polygon BNB arbitrum and optimism and evm compatible chains share developers with other evm compatible chains 87% of multi-chain developers work on at least one evm chain and um and so one thing that that kind of is is curious is if these developers are working across multiple ecosystems where does the Innovation come from where did they deploy code first um these graphs look at the percentage of so this this starts to go on chain this looks at the percentage of shared contract deployers across different evm chains so the way to read this is um of all the multi-chain based deployers 15% of them deployed on polygon and 22% of deployers on multi-chain deployers on base also deployed to ethereum um and I think the first thing that pops up is that ethereum has the most shared um number of deployers with other chains meaning that if you're deploying on another chain you're very very likely to have also deployed on ethereum same with polygon and same with BNB uh B&B polygon and ethereum share a lot of multi-chain deployers with each other um and then there's also some kind of interesting nuggets in here where um you can see for example that um if you're a multi-chain optimism deployer 30% of optimism's multi-chain deployers also deployed on arbitrum but only 133% of arbitrum multi-chain deployers deployed on optimism meaning that developers are on optimism are more likely to also Deploy on arbitrum but deployers on arbitrum uh may not go to optimism and so a lot of kind of interesting nuggets in here as well all right but where does innovation come from um and the way to look at that is where is new code first deployed on chain in order to do that we do this thing called uh like logic fingerprinting where we look at um we index across all the logic blocks and we create a unique identifier for each piece of logic and then we try to see where this logic first appears and so that allows us to say hey this is where the first instance of this code appeared and then it flowed to another chain so using this methodology we can see that 71% of contract code is initially deployed on ethereum this means that ethereum is the largest exporter of innovation in multi-chain development most people do something novel and interesting on ethereum first and then take that code elsewhere to another evm chain um and you can see that here too right where um the light yellow is native original code and um you know ethereum very very very notably has the highest share of original code um but there's also some you know interesting surprises here too at least for me when I was looking at this data which is there's um a fair amount of original code on BNB as well BNB also originates a lot of um new Innovative things same with polygon you're starting to see some emerging on arbitrum some on bass and so I think one thing I'm looking forward to is seeing as these l2s mature and as more people are multi-chain seeing um some of the core Innovation happening outside of ethereum as well um and then the other thing we can do is Trace where logic goes so this graph says that hey if your logic started on ethereum um where does it end up so a lot of ethereum logic ends up on BNB a lot of it stays on ethereum a lot of it ends up on polygon um and then you can also see that some for the logic that originates from B&B some of that goes over to um ethereum polygon arbitrum Etc as well which is really interesting to see how that Innovation travels across different chains I'll skip through some of this stuff um so today 79% of monthly active open- Source crypto developers work on bitcoin ethereum or other top 200 crypto ecosystems by Network value and 40% work on bitcoin or ethereum so how are Bitcoin and ethereum devs doing um let's go through Bitcoin pretty quickly Bitcoin has over a thousand monthly active developers that's down 19% year-over-year um you can see that established developers again developers who have been in crypto for two plus years actually grew 7% in 2023 three and all of the Lo um well not all of the losses but almost all the losses came from these new developers um who have been in crypto for less than a year basically tested did something in Bitcoin and then left in 2023 um and devs who build only for Bitcoin so this is looking at monthly active developers by whether they only build on bitcoin are they single chain or multi-chain devs and devs who build only for Bitcoin are more likely to stick around um over 1,000 new developers join Bitcoin every year since 2017 and um in 2023 Bitcoin notably saw a lot of transaction volume spikes and a lot of that was because of ordinals which is the uh black part of this chart and so then if we're look if we are to look at ordinal open- Source development um 40% of all Bitcoin open source developers were focused on bitcoin l2s and scaling Solutions in 2023 um and that has shown a lot of growth over time bit uh ordinal is only 3% of Open Source activity but the community was consistently active in 2023 I think it's also important to note that for most nft projects there's not really a ton of continuous open source contributions you have to make um and so that's one thing to keep in mind in looking these numbers as well as well as the fact that most nft projects actually are often closed source so not many of them are open source all right now let's look at ethereum ethereum had 7,864 monthly active developers by the end of 2023 um that fell 25% again established developers which is that darker line grew by 37% and all of the losses came from newcomers who have been in crypto for less than a year um a lot of the um the losses were actually evenly spread across multi-chain and single chain developers so just because you were a multi-chain developer doesn't mean you were more likely to leave ethereum um one kind of interesting thing here is I don't know if I is that multi-chain developers exceeded single chain Developers for the first time in 2021 so right now we're you know at least at the end of 2023 we were about even in terms of if you were a developer on ethereum um half of you are multi-chain and half of you only work on ethereum um but that was not always the case for most you know half of ethereum's History I guess um most developers were single chain developers only and so multi-chain is again this new emerging thing we're seeing that have stuck around 15,000 new developers supported ethereum in 21 22 and 2023 of course in 2022 it um skyrocketed to 37,000 but uh even in 2023 we're still seeing new developers coming in at higher numbers than um than many of the previous years and so a lot of new developers are still flooding into the ethereum ecosystem um okay with the last minute I'm going to skip over a lot of the stuff you can look at all of these charts on developer report.com so this breaks it down even more by different ecosystems you know we can look at arbitrum and Avalanche and C Etc so again just in the interest of time I'll skip over some of this stuff maybe one thing to to note that's pretty interesting is um there are a lot of new ecosystems that emerged in 2023 and um base is the biggest new ecosystem to appear in 2023 they started with zero devs before 2023 and had a thousand um over the course of Q4 Linea mantle and polygon ZK evm are also very notable new develop new ecosystems that um that are new since 2022 um okay so let's skip through to the geographic data which I think is very interesting there's you know we look at defi developers we look at nft um so where are crypto developers located around the world um to get this data we look at self-reported location data for 25,000 open developers what's really um what's really amazing is that crypto development is not concentrated in any Geographic data it's actually quite distributed and decentralized around the world and 72% of crypto developers actually live outside of North America and so the US and North America is really not the center of activity when it comes to open source developers and where they live um in fact uh the United States has been steadily losing share of developers since 2018 in 2018 the US had 40% share of all uh open source crypto developers and that has steadily declined over time now we have 26% in 2023 um so the the more red means that you lost developers green means that you gained developers and so um the US lost the most developer share uh over 2020 uh since 2018 um but you can see a lot of regions kind of growing a lot of its developer share um and that includes India parts of Africa South America parts of Europe and developers in general has shifted outside of North America and Europe since 2018 so my time is up but if you have any questions if you want to the full report is actually 180 slides of charts so if you would like to take a look at that please go to developer report.

com and thank you so much for your attention all right thanks so much Maria that was a great super insightful uh next up we have a very very interesting panel you want to make sure you stick around for AI and crypto integration so we're just going to