Ethereum is the market leader among developers, but competition is increasing at a quicker rate

The overall number of monthly active developers reached a record high of over 18,000, although Ethereum continues to have the most.

While the Ethereum ecosystem continues to have a greater number of developers than competing networks, they are catching up at a quicker pace of growth.

According to a recent analysis from crypto research company Electric Capital, Ethereum rivals such as Polkadot, Solana, and Binance Smart Chain are expanding quicker in terms of development activity.

It indicated that over 4,000 open-source developers work on Ethereum on a monthly basis – far more than the 680 who work on the Bitcoin network. The overall number of monthly active developers monitored across all chains exceeded 18,400, while the record for the number of code contributions by new developers was broken in 2021 with more than 34,000.

The metrics were derived from an analysis of around 500,000 code repositories and 160 million code commits, which are code modifications or updates. According to the research, the five biggest developer ecosystems are Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin.

Polkadot has over 1,500 developers in total, whereas Cosmos and Solana each have approximately 1,000. Other active ecosystems in terms of monthly developers include Cosmos, NEAR, which just unveiled a $800 million developer fund, Tezos, Polygon, and Cardano, all of which have more than 250 monthly developers.

While Ethereum remains the market leader — more than 20% of new Web3 developers have joined its ecosystem — competitor networks have grown at a faster rate.

“Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche, and Terra are expanding at a quicker rate than Ethereum at comparable stages in its history.”

The analysis contrasted the average monthly active developers between December 2020 and December 2021, finding that Solana’s monthly developers increased by 4.9 times, NEAR’s monthly developers increased by 4X, and Polygon’s monthly developers increased by more than double. Cosmos had a 70% rise in average monthly active developers, while BSC saw an 80% increase in 2021.

While the development growth rates for many early-stage projects are outstanding, Ethereum remains the king. The ecosystem maintains the greatest network of tools, decentralised applications, and protocols, which is 2.8 times bigger than its nearest competitor, Polkadot.

Over the last year or so, Solana, Avalanche, BSC, NEAR, and Terra have established themselves as DeFi hubs, recruiting other developers as use grows. According to the company, DeFi’s full-time monthly active contributors increased by 64% last year, and more than 500 new engineers contributed code to a DeFi project every month except January.

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