Introductions

What is NEAR?

A layer 1 and decentralized application (dApp) platform NEAR Protocol, a rival to Ethereum, is user- and developer-friendly. On the Near crypto network, transaction costs and storage are covered by its native NEAR tokens and was launched on April 22, 2020 with 1 billion NEAR tokens created. more info

What Electric Capital?

Electric Capital is an early stage venture firm focused on cryptocurrencies, blockchain, fintech, and marketplaces. more info

What is required from this analysis?

With Electric Capital’s release of its annual report on developer activity, the topic of “developers” is a hot topic across crypto.

How many developers are active on NEAR?
How active are they?
How this has changed over time?

[2].Complementary metrics

Since 2020 there is a gradual increase in the number of daily active developers this was amplified especially in 2022 with number of active developers peaking to 358 (around half (154) were contributor) on Jun 2022 but number of devs are decreasing since, Most of these developers were Contributors(39%) in addition owners and first time contributors had the least total number of associated developers.
A total of 6.1K developers were active on Near since 2020 which is still decently growing, bulk of these developers were active in 2022 and seems that it was the most crucial year for Near development scene.
Other than a jump to number of newly attracted devs on May 2020(#119) number of new developers dropped until Q4 2021 which it started to increase and number of newly gained developers peaked to 146 on Jun 2022 but since then it started to drop to the levels of early 2021 and seems that the hype train surrounding Near developing area is losing its gas.

What is analyzed in this analysis?

Developers on NEAR
Complementary metrics

Methodology

The table near.beta.github_activity was primely used for extracting visualized data regarding developers and their projects on NEAR platform since there was data going back to more than 4 years ago by default time span is set to beginning of 2020 with monthly time range.

The table near.core.fact_actions_events_function_call helped extracting metrics related to smart contracts on the platform.

All of these tables were provided by Flipsidecrypto database and to make these raw extracted data more comprehensible all types of proper charts and graphs were utilized.

[1].Developers on NEAR

Conclusion

Currently 6.5K (6.1K since 2020) developers are active on Near ecosystem most of them were active in 2022 and seems that number of developers and newly gained developers started to increase gradually especially after second half of 2021 with Near in general becoming a more relative ecosystem and find its footing among other ecosystems, as much as second half 2021-first half of 2022 could be named as the most fruitful years for Near 2023 is following the downward trend of the Near losing the hype of its developing scene which could be alarming as Near is a relatively young platform.
Second half of 2021 through early 2022 was also recorded a gradual increase to number of available contracts on Near but after Apr 2022 number of contracts started to decline seems that Near passed its peak in its technical growth this could also indicate that the platform matured faster than usual.
Only 36% of the projects on Near are closed while 40% are merged and 23% are still open so most of the projects on the platform are merged or closed.
Dependabot recorded by a long shot the most number of repos and projects it could be due to it being a debugging tool on github which can be a crucial step maintaining a global crypto eccosystem.

Thank you for your time!

With 6.2K Oct had the most number of contracts in 2020 after that number of contracts dropped till second half of 2021 which it started to recover again until peaking to 7.88K on Apr 2022 which after that number of monthly contracts started to decrease again and overall 118K smart contracts are accumulated on Near.

The developer Dependabot by far is the number one dev both in terms of projects and repositories with 10.K projects and 211 repositories, Dependabot-previews with 4.3K projects and Evegenykuzyakov are the second best performers in their respective fields.
Looks like that the is roughly equal number of closed project as there is merged ones(3.4K vs 3.7K) and only 23.6%, 2.2K of the project are still open which could indicate that most of the projects on Near’s developing scene are bound to have a closure after being initiated.