In this Unchained episode, Laura Shin welcome on Maria Shen unpack Bitcoin’s stability, Terra’s implosion, and many more insights from crypto’s open-source code.
Read our notes below to learn more.
Electric Capital Annual Developer Report
This is going to be an undercounting of developers.
Coinbase, Magic Eden, OpenSea and Alchemy is closed source
It looks at trend lines in terms of how developers are trending.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are open sources.
Code commit is when a developer creates a code update.
Our internal databases have 250 million code commits.
Top takeaways of the 2022 report
Developers is a fundamental measure of the health of an emerging industry more so than prices.
Developers tell us how many people are actually building, how many people are pushing new code, and how many people are creating protocols.
Prices fell 70% from their Peak last 2022, and Developers increased 5% year over year.
Causes of rapid increase of developers
Crypto grew very slowly, in the beginning, it took us close to 7 years to get to 1,000 monthly active developers so from the first time that Satoshi open-source Bitcoin code when Ethereum launched, we had a thousand open-source developers in the next 7 years.
We can see a lot of ecosystems grew significantly since 2018.
There's really been a kind of tremendous shift since that 2018 period.
Q: How did crypto bankruptcies have affected developer interest or developer activity?
One of the core things we tried to understand is who left when developers fall by 11%.
The segmentation that we did was through the frequency of commits we want to understand that not all developers are contributing code at an equal rate.
Full-time developers who are active for 10 or 10 or more days on a 28-day period that contribute 76% of the code.
TODAY’S EDITION IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY Alluo
Optimise DeFi yields with low cost and zero effort at app.alluo.finance.
Our easy-to-use platform enables simple exposure to multiple Curve, Convex and Frax.Convex pools, giving you access to complex strategies normally out of reach.
Earn a guaranteed rate in underlying assets in our fixed-rate pools or supercharge your yields by 25%+ in our BOOST pools - without increasing capital risk!
Find out more at App.alluo.finance
Full-time developers are a really important metric to track the actual health because they're the ones building the core protocols.
95% of the developers who left were part-time and one-time.
Part-time developers are the hackathon participants.
I think the most important sign of health is those full-time developers staying.
Interesting data about developers (Collapse of Terra Luna)
The time that Terra launched when their Network halted in May of 2022 Terra got up to 175 total developers, so actually not a huge ecosystem but the growth is really fast.
We see that Terra has 67 monthly active developers they have 7 full-time developers. there actually continue to be people building on Terra 2.
In The first half of 2022, 323 developers committed code to open-source Terra repositories, and of those 56 percent seems to have stopped contributing code to open-source crypto.
The remainder went to other ecosystems, most went into the Cosmos ecosystem.
Q: How has Ethereum's ability to attract developers fared in your opinion?
You can see in the numbers that there are other chains emerging.
Ethereum is the biggest developer ecosystem.
It is easy to be a developer in Ethereum.
We see that 16% of all new developers that come into crypto start in this Ethereum ecosystem.
Ethereum is like a starter pool for anyone who's coming in and they're able to retain a lot of developers.
Q: How do you see Ethereum's dominance and the competition it faces playing out in EVM compatible chains?
It turns out that 37% of L1s and L2s that have more than 50 full-time developers are EVM-compatible chains.
There's a tremendous benefits to being part of the EVM ecosystem,
It's very easy for anyone to extend an existing application to your chain.
Arbitrum is an excellent example where anyone working on GMX would be a primary developer on Arbitrum. Uniswap also supports Arbitrum.
Bitcoin developers remain flat
Bitcoin is a very mature ecosystem already.
Bitcoin is an ecosystem that actually does not encourage a lot of change.
Not looking for Bitcoin to grow 50%, I'm actually looking at Bitcoin being able to hold on to its existing developers.
What's really interesting is the steadiness and stability of Bitcoin.
NFTs development
We looked at what new wallets did on the chain.
New wallets are actually doing more things in the NFT universe than they are in the DeFi universe.
Developers grew 299% since January of 2021.
It's shown a lot of growth and so that trend line is really interesting but we think NFTs need other signals. We want to push more publicly.
Launched Developer Report
This is a site where you can not only explore the data from the report but also go very deep.
We have a time series on developer change across a hundred different ecosystems and projects. A resource that we hope can be really useful for the community.
Check out these important links
TODAY’S EDITION IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY Alluo
Optimise DeFi yields with low cost and zero effort at app.alluo.finance.
Our easy-to-use platform enables simple exposure to multiple Curve, Convex and Frax.Convex pools, giving you access to complex strategies normally out of reach.
Earn a guaranteed rate in underlying assets in our fixed-rate pools or supercharge your yields by 25%+ in our BOOST pools - without increasing capital risk!
Find out more at App.alluo.finance