Electrical Capital has published its annual report on trends in the world of open source. Bitcoin is of course on the front page.
Bitcoin, how many legions?
We learn in the report that the number of developers working on Bitcoin and other altcoins remained stable in 2022. There were 23,343 developers in December 2022.
The monthly number of active developers increased by +5% year-over-year despite a market drop of more than 70%.
Electric Capital notably observes an 8% growth in the number of full-time developers. This is the positive signal since they contribute 76% of the code.
Regarding Bitcoin, nearly 1000 developers have contributed to the building. Their number has hardly changed over a year. They were 944 in December 2021 against 920 in December 2022:
However, it was mainly developers who contributed only once who stopped contributing (-32%). Nearly 300 developers would work full-time on Bitcoin, and 500 part-time.
More than 140 new developers contribute Bitcoin code every month. More than 1000 new developers join the Bitcoin adventure every year since 2017.
For comparison, there are over 5,700 active Ethereum developers each month. That said, Ethereum is a gas factory filled with ERC-20 tokens. Bitcoin is, on the contrary, layer 1 which is destined to ossify.
Electric Capital notes that the number of monthly active developers is down 16% since the June 2022 high. Still, nearly 14,700 developers joined Ethereum in 2022, down from 11,366 in 2021.
Finally, note that the higher number of developers working on Ethereum does not really have a deep meaning. Especially when you know the number of shitcoins generated by Ethereum developers…
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