Introduction

Developers play a critical role in the crypto space, as they are responsible for creating, maintaining and updating the underlying technology of various cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects. Without developers, the crypto ecosystem would not be able to function, as they are the ones who design and implement the protocols, smart contracts, and other features that are needed to make the various blockchain networks operate effectively.

The presence of a strong developer community is a good indication of the health and vitality of a crypto ecosystem. This is because developers are the ones who are responsible for creating new features and functionality, as well as addressing any bugs or security issues that may arise. When there is a large and active developer community, it means that the project is likely to be well-maintained and have a strong development roadmap. This can help to attract new users and investors, as well as increase the overall value and utility of the crypto project.

Electric Capital’s developers report

Electrics Capital, a leading crypto venture firm, recently released a developers report for 2022. In this report, they fingerprinted 250 million code commits across open-source repositories to create a comprehensive report of the developer landscape of crypto in 2022.

An executive summary of the report:

1. Monthly active developers grew +5% year-over-year, despite 70%+ decline in prices.

• 23,343 monthly developers as of December 2022.
• 471,000+ monthly code commits are made monthly toward open-source crypto.
• +8% YoY growth in Full-Time developers. Full-Time developer growth is the most important growth signal to track because they contribute 76% of code commits.
• All-time high of 61,000+ developers contributed code for the first time in 2022.

2. Crypto developers increased meaningfully since 2018.

• Crypto network value is back to Jan 2018 levels, but monthly developers increased +297%

• 3x growth in Bitcoin monthly active developers, from 372 to to 946 since Jan 2018.

• 5x growth in Ethereum monthly active developers, from 1084 to 5819 since Jan 2018

• Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos, & Polygon grew from fewer than 200 devs to 1,000+ developers since Jan 2018

3. Major ecosystems are emerging beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.

• 72% of monthly active devs work outside the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.
• Solana, NEAR, and Polygon grew 40% YoY and have 500+ total monthly active developers.
• Sui, Aptos, Starknet, Mina, Osmosis, Hedera, Optimism, and Arbitrum grew 50%+ YoY and have 100+ total monthly active developers.
• 3,901 developers work in DeFi every month across multiple chains, +240% since DeFi summer. 50% of DeFi developers are outside of Ethereum.
• 900+ developers write code monthly in NFTs across chains, +299% since 2021.

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New and Active Developers

Methodology:

• New Developers
  • Developers that made their first commit in a given month. Calculated using the near.beta.github_activity table. First, calculate the first date a developer made a commit and truncate by month using min(createdat) and date_trunc('month', createdat) .
• Active Developers:
  • The number of developers that made at least one commit during a given month. Calculated using the near.beta.github_activity table with count(distinct(author)) and group by month.
• Developers by Start Year:
  • Find the year of the first contribution using the same methodology as with new developers. Then, all developers that were active in a given month using array_unique_agg(author) and join their start years. Then count the number of devs that were active using count(distinct(active_devs)) and group by month and start year.

Findings

• Given the summary of Electric Capital’s developers report, we could expect a rising number of new and active developers on NEAR. This expectation is reflected in the Github data from Flipside.
• We can see that both new and active developers follow a similar trend, with a slow rise up until 2021, then an almost increase up until June 2022 and then a decrease in developer activity.
• While the Electrics Capital report shows that price and developer activity do not always move together and this also seems to be the case for NEAR. Even though the price of the NEAR token fell around 82% between April and June 2022, the number of new and active developers kept increasing.
• However, since June 2022, it is clear that the number of new and active developers has been decreasing.
• Over 65% of current active developers started contributing in 2022.

Commits

Methodology:

• Number of Commits per Developer Distribution
  • First, we count the number of total commits per developer using count(*) and then grouping by author. Then we use case when to count the cases where a developer fall in a certain bracket based on the number of commits.
• Monthly Number of Commits among All Developers
  • Use count(*) and date_trunc('month', createdat) as date to count the total number of commits per month.
• Monthly Average Number of Commits per Developer over Time
  • For this graph, we divide the total number of commits per month by the number of active developers per month.

Findings

• Most developers on NEAR have between 1 and 5 all-time commits, which accounts for around 78% of all developers.
• A turning point seems to be around 200 commits, as only a handful of developers have 200+ commits.
• The average number of commits per month per developer has been trending down. This seems to be because the new developers that started in 2022 have contributed less. More on this in the next section.

Top Developers

Methodology:

• Top 100 developers with most commits
  • From the near.beta.github_activity table, use count(*) to count the number of commits and group by author
  • Rank by most commits and show only the first 100 results using limit 100
• Number of Commits over time for top 20
  • First we use select the top 20 author from the table made above.
  • Then, we count the number of commits per author in the top 20 and group by week.
  • Finally, we take the cumulative sum of commits over time.

Findings

• Developer bowenwang1996 currently has the most total commits at 992.
• For a long time, developer ilblackdragon had the most commits, but was taken over by bowenwang1996 in July 19th 2021.
• The third biggest developer nearmax was very active from 2018 to 2020, but has made only a few commits since then.
• Developer pmnoxx made a quick rise into the top 5, with over 600 commits between November 2021 and January 2022.

Developer Types

Methodology:

• Monthly Number of “1-commit” Developers
  • Count the number of commits per author and select the authors that have only made one commit
  • Then, count the number of developers that have made their commit for each month.
• Number of Developers by Type
  • Count the number of commits per author/developer and make group of the developers based on how many commits they have done.
  • Then, count the number of developers per group
• Number of Commits by Developer Type

  • Count the number of commits per author/developer and make group of the developers based on how many commits they have done.

  • Then, Count the number of commits per group per month

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Findings

• Over time, there have been more developers that have only made one commit.
• Almost half of all developers are developers that one made one commit.
• Only around 3.5% of all developers have more than 100 commits to their name.
• Over time, big devs with more than 500 commits, account for less and less of all the total monthly commits while small developers between 1 and 100 commits account for more of the monthly commits.

NEAR Developer Activity

In this dashboard, we’ll focus on the developer activity on NEAR using data from the new near.beta.github_activity table. This table contains open-source Github data of commits to various projects related to NEAR.

The objective of this dashboard is to answer the following questions:

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

In order to answer these questions, the following topics will be explored:

• New and Active Developers, examines trends in the amount of new and active developers per month. Also goes into the number of developers per start year.
• Commits, examines the number of commits among all developers and the average number of commits per developer over time. Also provides insight into the distribution of number of commits among developers.
• Average Commits per Month by Start Year, provides insight into the activeness of new developers compared to older developers.
• Developers by Days Active, examines how active developers are in terms of the number of days they commit.
• Top Developers, provides insight into the developers with the most commits
• Developer Type, examines the number of commits by developer type.

Notes

• One of the most active ‘authors’ on NEAR is the dependabot and dependabot-preview. These are not real developers, as this is an automated dependency updater built into Github. Therefore, these two names are filtered out.

• A commit is defined as uploading new code/code changes to a Github repository.

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Average Number of Commits per Month per Developer by Start Year

Why has the average number of commits per developer been trending down? For this, we look at the average number of commits per developer for each start year. If it turns out that developers that started in 2022 have contributed less, we have our answer.

Methodology:

• First, we calculate the year each developer made their first commit. This is calculated using the near.beta.github_activity table. First, calculate the first date a developer made a commit and truncate by year using min(createdat) and then truncating to year using year(date_trunc('year', first_commit)) as start_year.
• Then we calculate how many developers have started in each year. This is done by counting the number of different authors and grouping by start year.
• Then we calculate the total number of commits from all developers of each start year
• Next, we calculate the number of months that have passed since each year until now. This is done to able to normalize for time.
• We calculate the average number of commits per month per developer per start year by dividing the total number of commits in a year by the number of developers that have started that year. Then we divide by the number of months since the start year to get the final result.

Findings

• It is indeed the case that newer developers have contributed less, even after accounting for the fact that they have had less time to make contributions.
• Developers that started after 2019 have significantly less average number of commits per month than those that started in 2018 and 2019.
• The most active developers are the ones that started in 2018, with an average of almost 10 commits per month on average since 2018.
• Developers that started have, on average, contributed the least per month per developer at only 0.42 commits per month.

Developers by Number of Days Active

Methodology:

• First, calculate which days each developer made a commit. This is done using the table near.beta.github_activity and count(*) and group by month and author.

• Then, we calculate how many days each developer has made a commit for each month.

• Next, we take the average for every developer across all months and round to the nearest integer.

• Finally, we count the number of developers per day active.

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Findings

• Around 2/3 of developers, or 67% only contribute once a month.
• Only 20 developers contribute 10 days or more per month on average.

Key Findings

This dashboard was made to answer the following questions:

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

Let’s answer the questions based on the findings in this dashboard:

• How many developers are active on NEAR?
  • There are currently 2480 developers that have made at least 1 commit.
  • 65% of these developers made their first commit in 2022
  • June 2022 saw the most active developers at 330 and also the most new developers at 146.
• How active are they?
  • Around 2/3 of developers, or 67% only contribute only make a commit once a month.
  • 78% of all developers have between 1-5 commits. 48.8% has made only one commit.
  • Only 20 developers contribute 10 days or more per month on average.
  • When making a distinction between the start year of the developers, the devs from 2018 are the most active, at an average of almost 10 commits per developer per month. The devs from 2018 are the least active at only 0.42 commits per month per developer.
  • The developer with the most commits is bowenwang1996 who currently has a total commits of 992.
• How has this changed over time?
  • Over time the number of new and active developers on NEAR is increasing.
  • Over time the monthly number of commits is increase, but the average number of commits per developer is decreasing. This is because new developers are on average committing significantly less than developers that started in 2018 and 2019.
  • Over time, there have been more developers that have made only one commit
  • Big devs with more than 500 commits, account for less and less of all the total monthly commits while small developers between 1 and 100 commits account for more of the monthly commits.