Number of Devs on Ethereum Remains Robust Despite Market Pullback: Telstra

Telstra Ventures – the investing arm of Australian telecommunication giant Telstra – released a health report on three top blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, by studying the extent of participation derived from developers in each ecosystem. With the most number of monthly active contributors, noted the Ventures, Ethereum is the “strongest and largest community” out of the three.

The report also found that unfunded opportunities are still widely available in the ecosystems mentioned above, with venture and corporate investors only betting around half of the top 10 projects in each.

Ethereum in Reign

The number of active contributors is a key metric reflecting the strength of blockchain networks. With the rise in popularity and use cases, they also tend to attract more regular contributors. Telstra Ventures analyzed the compound annual growth rate of unique active contributors across three major blockchains, stating that Ethereum’s community has grown 24.9% in the past four years since Jan. 1st, 2018.

Despite the sharp price drop since last November, its number of monthly contributors has only slipped by 9% as of July this year, indicating that the ongoing crypto winter has not curbed developers’ overall confidence in the network.

Moreover, the upcoming Merge poised to finalize the transition from PoW to PoS has steadied the overall interest, as the number of monthly active developers has remained above 2,500 each month since the first half of 2021.

Compared to Ethereum, Solana has experienced explosive growth in the same period, with an annual compound growth rate reaching an astounding 173%. However, it fails to maintain the stability Ethereum does. Since its native token SOL climbed to the peak price of $204 last November, the number of active contributors has declined by 21%, sitting at slightly over 250 by July.

Unlike the two Layer 1 networks, the Bitcoin ecosystem has witnessed an 8% growth of monthly active contributors since BTC peaked in November. Overall, it has attained steady growth in terms of attracting new developers over the past eight years, the report said.

Opportunities Still Available

Even though the bear market wards off enthusiasm from crypto VCs – noticeably shown in Coinbase Ventures’s Q2 deal activity down 34% – Telstra Ventures believes many opportunities within the top ecosystems still remain open to institutional investors.

After looking into more than 30,000 open source Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana projects in the Web3 ecosystem, the venture noted that 70% of fastest growing projects are backed by VCs or by corporations.

Also, only 4 to 5 of the top 10 most active projects in each ecosystem are backed by venture and corporate investors, suggesting that roughly half of the high-potential projects still remain untouched by institutional investors.