The 2023 Developer Report Reveals an Uptick in Multi-Chain Code by Tenured Developers

Crypto is global, and it's now multi-chain! According to a new report by Maria Chen, a principal venture capitalist from Electric Capital, more than 7,000 developers have joined the blockchain ecosystem in the last five years, based on data compiled from Github's open-source repository commits. Blockchain operators leverage their knowledge, experience, and tools to inform the data, allowing these resources to guide your next hypothesis.

Blockchain development is still in its infancy stage, and due to the nature of many new ecosystems being dependent on open-source code, there are numerous unique attributes to consider. These attributes could provide valuable context clues into the future of crypto development.

In 2023, the industry witnessed the beginning of a bear market. Despite shifts in the ecosystem, this report shows that developers who contributed code to open-source blockchains were unscathed by market trends. It's important to note that these developers are not solely based in the US; many of them are working on projects internationally and possess a higher level of sophistication than we might realize. The report identifies the activity of both "newcomers" and "tenured/emerging" developers who have significantly contributed to advancing the industry, thanks to the proliferation of multi-chain applications.

Here are some top insights to consider based on the report:

1. The future of crypto applications is multi-chained. It's common for a developer to work across two or more chains, meaning Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility. Since 2018, there has been a 125% uptick in developers who are building across multiple ecosystems.

2. 87 percent of developers are building across 2 or more blockchains and they are deploying on-chain logic code primarily on Ethereum, Polygon, and other L2s.

3. Developers who are building on Bitcoin spiked in 2023 because of the development of Ordinals, a process that includes inscribing content (images, texts, json, etc) on a single satoshi. It's similar to how NFTs work with Ethereum. 

4. There were 7,000 more developers added to the ecosystem since the last bear market. 

5. 12 out of the top 15 contracts were for Defi and NFT-related onchain interactions, and 50% of defi developers are working on Stablecoins or DEXes.

6. NFT-based smart contracts declined in 2023, since 2022. Also, Ethereum no longer is premier chain to host NFTs. Not surprisingly, Solana, Polygon, and Bitcoin are some of the top go-to chains for new NFT collections. 

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In general, the 180-page extensive report shows what ecosystem developers are spending time and a glimpse into how successful ecosystems will be with the amount of coding time spent. It doesn't however share what they are building, which could be even more insight into what applications to focus on. So why does this report matter? As the crypto industry becomes mass-adopted by global traditional industries and regulations are put in place to provide a fair playing system, the developers who will be the most sought after will be those who have the most experience expanding and building code across ecosystems to serve unique use cases.

Check out the full report here: https://www.developerreport.com/developer-report