news Electric Capital Report 2020: Ethereum far outpaces Bitcoin in developer activity

[kyoukage01 3181]

Spoiler

Ethereum Far Outpaces Bitcoin in Developer Activity in 2020: Electric Capital Report

Brady Dale

 

The number of developers in crypto is ticking up again, according to the annual developer report from venture firm Electric Capital.

 

And one network remains a clear winner in terms of attractiveness to coders. “More than 300 new developers per month are joining Ethereum,” Maria Shen, a partner at Electric and the report’s author, told CoinDesk. “Ethereum has continuously grown through Crypto Winter.”

 

The report tracks ecosystems by blockchain. In other words, a Bitcoin developer is counted toward Bitcoin even if the person is working on its Lightning Network or any of its wallets. Similarly, Ethereum’s numbers are driven by developers working on tokens that rely, fundamentally, on Vitalik’s world computer.

 

Of the ecosystem, Electric’s report shows Ethereum so far out in front that second place is almost misleading. Almost 2,300 average monthly developers worked on Ethereum across the third quarter of 2020, with Bitcoin in second at a bit under 400.

 

Still, the good news for the industry is broader: Developer numbers are going up across crypto’s stronger projects.

 

Electric’s data is based on ongoing scraping of all the publicly available code documentation (89 million code commits across just under 300,000 repositories on sites such as GitHub and GitLab from January to October). No one can know who is a paid staffer, who is a volunteer and who is trying to earn street cred that will get him or her a spot as a paid staffer. For that reason, the report also takes pains to segment contributors out by their rate of contribution.

 

All that said, when viewed across the board most people believe looking at developer activity in aggregate can be a good sign of health for any open-source technology project, crypto or otherwise.

 

“New monthly crypto developers grew 15% in 2020,” Shen writes in the report’s summary, noting also that the “Bitcoin ecosystem has 70% more developers than it did three years ago.”

 

Electric takes pains to track contributions, developers and to remove double counts as much as possible. For more detail on their methods, check out the report. 

Also-rans

The report drew a line between the top 200 crypto projects by value and the rest, noting that much of the loss in developer activity occurred in the smaller projects, offsetting much of the gains elsewhere. Electric called this a flight to quality.

 

Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polkadot, Tezos, Cardano and EOS are the largest networks, each averaging more than 100 monthly developers. Of those, only EOS lost developers when the third quarter of 2020 is compared to 2019.

 

While many might think that making a distinction between the top 200 and the rest is still a too-generous threshold, Shen said there are likely some very small networks now that will rise up soon. Longtime denizens of the lower echelons of the top 200 are less likely to ascend but there could be some new arrivals that surprise everyone, and that’s why Electric drew the distinction so generously.

DeFi

The most striking area of growth has been in decentralized finance (DeFi), which has been a major topic in 2020.

 

No one can know for sure why new people are coming in, but Electric’s team had some guesses. Shen noted the tooling is better than it has ever been and there’s so much proven code to fork and build upon. That makes it easier to get started.

 

Electric co-founder Curtis Spencer noted that we’re now in an era where a developer can deploy a smart contract and very rapidly see an enormous amount of assets move into it. Even if they give control of that application away through a fair launch, as has become popular this year, that can still just be tremendously gratifying to someone who just wants to build.

 

Shen concurred that the engagement alone can be rewarding. “Once you launch a protocol, suddenly tens of millions of dollars are wrapped in your protocol,” she said.

 

For users of DeFi, though, sometimes this eagerness to see people use projects has come at a cost. Depositor beware.

Getting started

But some of the new activity also, no doubt, comes down to the fact that crypto is a space so well resourced that it’s fairly easy, for technical adepts, to get a new company started. 

 

“We’ve seen a professionalization of grant funds,” Spencer added. This means that well-resourced layer one projects are eager to support promising devs with ideas for applications that might entice users. That makes it easier to get a company off the ground.

 

It should be noted that a grant kicked off Uniswap, now one of the biggest projects out there, in terms of funds entrusted to it.

 

Ken Deeter, another Electric Capital partner, said the growth in DeFi might also be partially attributed to developers from fintech frustrated by what they can’t do there.

“DeFi is a really interesting area … where there’s an ability for developers to really experiment in a way that in the traditional financial system is difficult to do,” Deeter said.

 

In last year’s report, Electric explained that testnets were always moments that saw strong growth in developer activity, led by developments on the Cosmos network. Shen said that has continued to hold true, noting that NEAR had a strong showing this year.

 

Though the spikes fall after the incentives run out, she said they still see gains in ongoing participation following these booms.

 

The prior report also heavily emphasized the total number of commits in 2019 hadn’t fallen, though the number of developers had. There’s no update on commit volume this time around, however.

 

“We chose not to include it in this report,” Shen said, because some commits are so much less significant than others.

source: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-outpaces-bitcoin-developer-activity-2020-electric-capital-report

 

As the very depressing Year 2020 is coming to a close, there should be now a number of year-end reports being published on various websites. One such report was made by a venture firm called Electric Capital where they stated that there are more developers joining Ethereum, the #2 ranked cryptocurrency, compared to Bitcoin, the current #1.

 

The full report by Electric Capital can be seen on this separate article:

https://medium.com/electric-capital/electric-capital-developer-report-2020-9417165c6444

 

DeFi has played a significant role in the compilation of the report, as we know of the hype surrounding it during recent months. Developers have sniffed an opportunity to earn huge, and they did so. The article also supports this notion to some degree.

 

Ethereum is hogging the crypto developers. How does the other coins fare so far? According to the article, "Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polkadot, Tezos, Cardano and EOS" are the top ones on the report. If your favorite altcoin is not on that list, then the chance is high that it did not acquired as much developers as the listed ones.

 

With such a lot of developers, it won't be a surprise then if there is a news published in the future where even more developers are building projects based on ETH 2.0. Meanwhile, Bitcoin projects may slow down as there are fewer developers that would want to focus more on it.

 

What do you think?

 

For more details, please read the linked articles above.

 

Edited December 11, 2020 by kyoukage01

[1qDan 478]

For some reason, when reading this topic, the idea comes to mind that although this is something "good" in the first instance since clearly new projects will be developed, I can't stop thinking that it could be a bubble but from developers , that is, there is the possibility that there are more projects than investors ... I understood that ...

[Ridam 7455]

Well it's great to see that such growth of developers in open source project which clearly heralded that Crypto Currency and Blockchain are future. In one side there are companies hiring developers specially in Closed source project and for open source developers are coming with their interest and great devotion because of which the project will get maximum effort from them.

And According to that report, I read that Bitcoin developers are also 70% up than 3 years ago. For comparison with ethereum, I believe because of whole new development and upgrade over the network and huge attention, it has surpassed Bitcoin Developers number. 

As we know Ethereum needs more Developers at this time because of the 2.0 upgrade.

And since 2017 , Crypto Developers are increasing for first time as stated there, I see this as Bullish indication too.

It would be surprise if Ada wasn't on the alts list. Ada is also getting significant upgrade in coming Goguen Era and shelly has been completed so it's good to see one of my favourite in that list.

 

 

[Froshk 1828]

Ethereum has no competitor and is not in competition when it comes to development networks, the number of coins and Token that uses the Ethereum network says it all. Not even bitcoin can stand the Ethereum feet when it comes to these aspect 

[Frodler 943]

19 hours ago, 1qDan said:

For some reason, when reading this topic, the idea comes to mind that although this is something "good" in the first instance since clearly new projects will be developed, I can't stop thinking that it could be a bubble but from developers , that is, there is the possibility that there are more projects than investors ... I understood that ...

Honestly these is True though , nowadays we see more projects than the project developers themselves, and most of these projects are positioned to out perform the preceeding ones, more like an upgrade if I may call it. 

[Abdul1168782 572]

Really good project  and by this their are more options for earning instead of investment. And by this we can get good profit and really a good developing project. And rlthe second rising currancy in crypto world.

[cryptovlek 2597]

What is interesting is the chart of the number of developers in Ethereum from the link from coindesk. 

 

 

It is still bearish and seem to found a bottom but it can keep declining. DeFi given a stop to the downtrend but it didn't reverse this chart yet. Seem that the competition is too high from the rest platforms. Tron, EOS, Polkadot and the rest will see increase as there will be successes in their platforms too.

[pablomarwan 3082]

There are other currencies that can be used in this currency. However, there is news indicating that the bears will use these small currencies in order to start entering into short positions. You have to pay attention to these steps that will start the bears moving.

[Syedbesharat 5423]

The ETH have make progress and attract note developers toward project. Their for we can expect make project ETH base in future. The EOS also make new update by introducing new crypto game for old game users where the people invest through crypto and get earning in Eos coin. One of the top increasing to me are Polkadot and Tezos, Cardiano coin who are not big but get the big adoption in 2020.Although market hit by Corona virus and economic instability but these coins shows the increase in price. 

[Khan 1414]

On 12/22/2020 at 3:02 AM, pablomarwan said:

There are other currencies that can be used in this currency. However, there is news indicating that the bears will use these small currencies in order to start entering into short positions. You have to pay attention to these steps that will start the bears moving.

Ethereum chance to rise is high now as the Bitcoin is maintaing its price above the $25k, ETH start increasing and now its price is above the $740 in the Yobit exchange and the minimum expected target for ETH is to reach $1000.

[percare 3192]

I don't understand the exact meaning of developers of Ethereum. I thought the developers of Ethereum are those that are reading the code, testing changes and making suggestions. Are the developers of ERC20 tokens called ethereum developers too? Bitcoin has a team of developers but it doesn't have smart contracts and it is not a platform like Ethereum. So in the wider term of naming as ethereum developers everyone that is a dev of a token, then Bitcoin should only have around 50 people and Ethereum thousands. As the post says 2500 ethereum devs. Might be more. But for Bitcoin how are the developers make it to 400? They count those that have stopped for years too? The active developers aren't so many.

Edited January 6, 2021 by percare

[bogdanoff 3173]

Ethereum has been rapidly developed and lately the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade that just started will turn the eyes of the financial world in Ethereum and call it a financial wonder. It will still be behind Bitcoin and will take something extraordinary to reach it in market share. The number of developers being active in Ethereum and the increase of this number is an important indicator.