According to Web3 VC firms Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Electric Capital, the number of active, open-source developers in crypto has reached its lowest level since 2020.
Data from the former State of Crypto Index shows that crypto coders have nearly halved from last year's peak, sliding from 36,500 active developers in January 2022 to 19,630 active developers in September 2023.
The last time developers stayed below this level was at the beginning of the crypto bull market in December 2020, boasting around 18,100 divs at the time, before roaring higher alongside the digital asset market.
Paul Cafiro, communications partner of a16z Crypto, confirmed to Decrypt that the information was accurate. However, CTO Eddy Lazzarin tweeted that the image displayed may not tell the whole story.
“To track active crypto developers, we use Electric Capital's popular ecosystem project to identify crypto-related Github repositories,” Lazzarin tweeted. The tool accurately tracks the number of crypto-specific repositories on the site and the number of active developers working with each.
“We're curious to see how much crypto dev is happening outside of the open source infra repos reflected here,” he said.
“Open-source” development refers to writing code that is readily available and freely distributed to anyone. Crypto founders often prefer to open their projects by decentralizing and demonstrating trust rather than claiming their projects as intellectual property.
While the crypto market itself may affect the number of developers, the firm suspects that a larger number of developers are moving to the crypto application layer. There, he says, activity is increasing, but it's hard to track on a dev-by-dev basis.
The CTO mentioned 16z-funded projects Blackbird, History Protocol, Proof of Play, and AIK, all of which “primarily work on private storage within the app.”
In fact, other data indicate that the growth of crypto in general is still increasing. A16z also follows last month's all-time high for crypto developer libraries.
A spokesperson for a16z told Decrypt that “it's more reflective of the amount of activity as opposed to the number of people working. The representative explained that this might be a better measure of how much development is actually happening than a simple developer count.”
“One of those developers could be working on just one word, and the other could be working on it full time, and they'd be considered the same.
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