The number of active developers per month reached a record high of over 18,000, but Ethereum still retains the highest number.
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Although the Ethereum ecosystem has more developers than other networks, they are growing at a faster pace.
According to Electric Capital, the crypto research firm that studies blockchain development, competitors such as Polkadot and Solana, Ethereum is growing faster than its main competitor, Binance Smart Chain (BSC). This report was released by Electric Capital on Thursday.
It was revealed that Ethereum has more than 4,000 active open-source developers per month — significantly more than the 680 on the Bitcoin network. The total number of monthly active developers was greater than 18,400 across all chains. In addition, the record for the most code commits made by new developers was broken in 2021 with 34,000.
These measurements were made by analysing around 500,000 code repositories as well as 160 million code commits. Code commits are updates or changes to code. The report found that Ethereum, Polkadot and Cosmos are the largest five developer ecosystems.
According to the report Polkadot boasts approximately 1,500 developers, while Cosmos is around 1,000 and Solana is around 1,000.
Cosmos, Near, which launched a $800 million developer fund in October, and Cardano, Tezos, Polygon, and Cardano, each of which have more than 250 monthly developers, were other active ecosystems.
While Ethereum is still dominant — more than 20% of new Web3 developers joined its ecosystem — rival networks have seen greater growth.
“Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche, and Terra are growing faster than Ethereum did at similar points in its history.”
The report compared the average monthly active developers between December 2020 and December 2021, noting that Solana grew by 4.9 times, Near had a 4x growth rate, and Polygon’s monthly developers more than doubled. Cosmos had a 70% increase in average monthly active developers, and BSC’s increase was 80% over the course of 2021.
While the development growth figures are impressive for more early-stage projects, Ethereum is still the king. The ecosystem continues to retain the largest network of tools, decentralized applications and protocols and is 2.8 times larger than its closest rival, Polkadot.
Solana, Avalanche, BSC, Near and Terra have emerged as decentralized finance (DeFi) hubs over the past year or so, attracting more developers as adoption increases. DeFi full-time monthly active contributors grew by 64%, and more than 500 new developers contributed code to a DeFi project every month last year aside from January, it reported.
