More than 16,000 new developers joined the Ethereum ecosystem between January and September this year, according to the Ethereum Foundation, citing data from Electric Capital.
Solana was the second most preferred destination for new developers, with more than 11,500 developers writing code for the ecosystem; however, a Solana Foundation representative said the data may be outdated.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin saw nearly 7,500 new developers.
This makes the Ethereum ecosystem home to the biggest active developer base across all blockchain projects, with 31,869 developers. In comparison, Solana has the second-largest with 17,708 developers, and Bitcoin has 11,036 developers.
Notably, the data for the Ethereum ecosystem includes the Ethereum layer-1 network along with layer-2 networks as defined by L2Beat, such as Arbitrum, Unichain, Optimism, and more, and doesn’t double-count developers working for multiple networks within the ecosystem.
Solana’s two-year growth is notable
Despite leading the pack, full-time developers in the Ethereum ecosystem grew by only 5.8% in the past year and 6.3% over the past two years.
Meanwhile, Solana saw a sharp increase of 29.1% over the past year and a staggering 61.7% increase over the past two years, according to a developer tracker developed by Electric Capital.
Unaccounted Solana developers
However, Solana Foundation’s head of developer relations, Jacob Creech, said Electric Capital’s data underreports the number of developers on Solana by around 7,800.
Creech has asked developers to submit their GitHub repositories so they can be accurately tracked by Solana crawlers that compile Solana-related activity on GitHub.
Others have also questioned the data, as some chains were grouped together, while others were omitted, despite all the chains operating on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
“EVM chains should be grouped together. Developers on Polygon and BNB clearly can reuse the majority of skills and EVM tooling,” Nethermind founder Tomasz K. Stańczak said.
Related: Sorare CEO still bullish on Ethereum despite ‘upgrading’ to Solana
Cointelegraph reached out to Electric Capital, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Could AI be inflating numbers?
Meanwhile, Jarrod Watts, head of Australia for layer-2 network Abstract, has cast doubt on the number of new developers entering the space, arguing that AI coding and hackathon repos are inflating the figures.
“IMO this data likely includes a tonne of vibe coding slop and hackathon repos that are never touched again… I don’t think I can name one new crypto dev that started this year,” said Watts.
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