More than 16,000 new developers joined the Ethereum ecosystem between January and September this year, according at the Ethereum Foundation, citing data from Electric Capital.
Solana is the second most preferred destination for new developers, with more than 11,500 developers writing code for the ecosystem; However, a Solana Foundation representative said the data may be out of date.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has seen nearly 7,500 new developers.
This makes the Ethereum ecosystem home to the largest active developer base of all blockchain projects, with 31,869 developers. In comparison, Solana has the second largest with 17,708 developers, and Bitcoin has 11,036 developers.
Notably, the data for the Ethereum ecosystem includes the Ethereum layer-1 network along with layer-2 networks as defined by L2Beat, such as arbitrum, unichain, optimism, and more, and does not double-count developers working for multiple networks within the ecosystem.
Solana’s two-year growth has been remarkable
Despite leading the pack, full-time developers in the Ethereum ecosystem grew by just 5.8% over the past year and 6.3% over the past two years.
Meanwhile, Solana has seen a sharp increase of 29.1% over the past year and a staggering 61.7% increase over the past two years, according in a developer tracker developed by Electric Capital.
UNACCOUNTED SOLANA DEVELOPERS
However, Solana Foundation’s head of developer relations, Jacob Creech, said Electric Capital’s data puts the number of developers in Solana at about 7,800.
Creech asked developers to submit their GitHub repositories so they can be accurately tracked by the Solana crawler that compiles Solana-related activity on GitHub.
Others also questioned the data, as some chains were merged, while others were deleted, despite all chains running on the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).
“EVM chains should be integrated. The developers at Polygon and BNB can obviously reuse most of EVM’s skills and tooling,” Nethermind founder Tomasz K. Stańczak said.
Related: Sorare CEO is still bullish on Ethereum despite Solana ‘upgrade’
Cointelegraph reached out to Electric Capital, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
Can AI be numbers?
Meanwhile, Jarrod Watts, Australian leader for Layer-2 Network Abstracts, submitted Doubt With the number of new developers entering the space, focusing on AI coding and hackathon repos are driving the numbers.
“IMO This data probably includes a ton of vibe coding slop and hackathon repos that have never been touched again… I don’t think I can name a single new crypto dev that started this year,” Watts said.
Magazine: Back to Ethereum: How Synthetix, Ronin and Celo saw the light
