Electric Capital’s mid-year crypto industry developer report revealed that there are 21,300 monthly active open-source developers as of June 1, 2023.
However, that figure has decreased by 22% year-on-year since June 2022. Those that left the space recently were newcomers who had worked in crypto for less than a year, it noted.
Furthermore, they were only responsible for less than 20% of all code commits, so the declines are not as bad as they seem.
Developers who have worked in crypto for 12 months or more continue to build, contributing over 80% of code commits. The research analyses GitHub activity over the period to derive these figures for developer activity in the crypto space.
Another bullish statistic is that there are more active developers now than during the bull market peak two years ago.
The declines have come in the wake of last year’s high-profile collapses, including Terra/Luna and FTX. However, old hands have stayed the course and continued to work on crypto projects, building through the bear market.
“Newcomer developers have decreased because fewer new developers are trying crypto,” the report noted. Moreover, it added that newcomers in bear markets have lower retention rates.
With this in mind, the declines over the past year are nothing unusual and mirror those in previous bear markets.
A related developer activity report from blockchain analytics platform Santiment revealed that the leading platform for the metric is Polkadot.
The platform recorded a 30-day developer activity figure of 546 for Polkadot and its “canary network” Kusama, keeping the two at the top of the list above Cardano in third.
Last month, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced plans to allocate more capital to Bitcoin developers with a pledge of $5 million.
Crypto markets remain in bear territory at the moment, failing to break resistance for the second time. This has resulted in another pullback, with total capitalization currently down marginally at $1.21 trillion.
BTC and ETH have not moved much over the weekend, trading at $30,148 and $1,860, respectively.
The entire top twenty altcoins were in the red during the Monday morning Asian trading session as market sentiment continues to weaken.