Developers blossomed in 2022 crypto winter

The number of web3 developers has gone up by 5.4%, reaching over 233,000 in the last months despite the crypto market seeing a 70% decline in crypto prices.

The crypto winter has had several impacts on the crypto space and other sectors. However, as of recent reports, the number of devs still increased during the crypto winter despite the crisis.

Crypto winter is great for devs

According to a recent report from Electrical Capital, full-time web developers from GitHub also recorded a 15,7% increase bringing them to over 7000 developers, whereas one-time builders declined 6.2% to more than 3,500 between December 2021 and December 2022.

Monthly development activity is, however, still on the rise despite market capitalization starting its procured decline from its all-time high, which stood at $2.9 trillion as of November 2021.

However, monthly development activity only began as of June 2022, when the metric hit its all-time-high with digits totaling roughly 26,500. This decline was ascribed partly to a decrease in developer activity in the Terra ecosystem after its catastrophic collapse in May 2022.

Weekly developers’ numbers fall

Despite the increase, the report shows that weekly web3 devs dropped by a 26% valuation between June and September.

More new web3 developers released their first line of open-source encryption code in the last year (109,723) than they will between the years 2014 and 2020 combined (101,054).

ETH’s full-time developers still dominate developers as their numbers saw a 9% spike raising their total number to 1,873. This new rise saw the ETH dev space surpass the combined Polkadot, Cosmos, and Solana ecosystems.

This clearly shows Ethereum continues to dominate developer activity, as seen by the fact that its full-time developer count increased (383).

Don’t rule out other networks just yet

Despite the Ethereum network registering these tremendous growth rates, other networks have not been left in the dips. Cosmos and Solana’s networks also saw a 34% and 36% surge, respectively, with Starknet recording a whopping 214% gain in developers’ total numbers.

This makes Starknet one of the most successful mid-sized ecosystems in 2022.

However, these results could have been greatly fueled by the Terra collapse. The collapse saw just 28 (9%) of the platform’s initial developers remaining to work on Terra 2.0, while 143 developers (42% of the total) gave up and moved on to other ecosystems.

Many developers reportedly sought refuge at Cosmos and other networks while escaping the troubles of Terra. According to Electric Capital, the number of web3 developers is far more than shown in the study since certain projects are not open-sourced.