The Solana blockchain is growing rapidly: last year the number of active developers was more than 2,500 each month. Does this make the crypto project dangerous for Ethereum?
• Solana with new milestone
• Important metric
• Electric Capital measures lower number of developers
Solana Report: More than 2,500 active developers per month
The Solana blockchain project has reached a milestone: As the Solana Foundation, the developer behind the blockchain and the associated cryptocurrency SOL, announced at the beginning of January 2024, it can now count more than 2,500 active developers per month among its supporters.
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1/ In 2023, the Solana developer ecosystem made major advances in tooling, developer experience, & quality of content.
Today the Solana ecosystem has over 2500 monthly active developers on open source repositories and developer retention is over 50%.https://t.co/XwByL3HSuR?? pic.twitter.com/UnglforurA
– Solana (@solana) January 8, 2024
In its “2023 State of the Solana Developer Ecosystem” report, the organization revealed further details on how to reach the hurdle. “Over the past year, we have had a consistent number of 2,500 to 3,000 monthly active developers building on Solana,” the report said.
Important metric for growth of the Solana network
The number of active developers per month is important because it can be used as an indicator of how quickly and strongly the Solana blockchain is growing, according to the creators of the cryptocurrency in the annual report. “One of the easiest ways to measure the growth of a network is by the number of monthly active developers working on the chain,” it continues. “A consistent number of developers is an important indicator of a healthy ecosystem as it demonstrates the ecosystem’s ability to attract and retain new talent.”
More developers involved in private repositories
According to the Solana Foundation, the actual number of developers is likely to be even higher, as the data presented only includes those supporters who work on public repositories. In addition, the network will also be further developed in private directories. “This may lead to an underestimate of the number of active developers at any given time,” the report’s creators explained. “The Solana Foundation is committed to supporting the growth of the open source community on the Solana blockchain, and the foundation’s renewed support for public development will help drive innovation for the future of Solana-based applications.”
Electric Capital Developer Report Calculates Lower Number
However, this is contradicted by data from the risk company Electric Capital, which specializes in cryptocurrencies and which examines the open source development of the crypto industry in its developer report. To do this, the company evaluates GitHub repositories and source code from various crypto projects and processes the data obtained. According to the December 31 report, the number of active Solana developers for the month was 1,615.
In addition, Electric Capital’s Developer Report revealed that the majority of programmers involved worked on the project for less than ten days per month.
Solana uses open source data
However, according to the Solana Foundation, the number was above the 2,500 developer mark in every month of 2023. It is not clear whether both reports access different data sources. “At the Solana Foundation, we use an open source service to collect developer data and have publicly documented how we collect this data,” wrote the SOL developer in its annual report. A project page on GitHub shows which libraries the Solana Foundation uses for its compilation and how the data is further processed.
Migration from Ethereum to Solana?
For comparison: According to the Developer Report, the Ethereum network has 7,864 active developers every month. According to “BeInCrypto”, Solana is currently considered an attractive alternative among Ethereum users. The rollup ecosystem of the second largest cryptocurrency can improve the speed on the main blockchain by outsourcing transactions, but the numerous secondary environments have now become too chaotic for many developers. That is why there is a migration to the inseparably assembled Solana blockchain.
Crypto analyst believes Ethereum is superior
Crypto analyst Miles Deutscher, on the other hand, believes it is premature to write off Ethereum, as he wrote via X (formerly Twitter).
It’s the “Ethereum is dead” stage of the cycle again.
This narrative seems to intermittently rear its head (usually when $ETH is experiencing slow price action).
Funnily, just 6 months ago people were saying the same thing about $SOL and the Alt-L1 thesis.
Don’t forget that…
– Miles Deutscher (@milesdeutscher) December 21, 2023
Ethereum still has the largest developer ecosystem, the highest funding share, the chance of a spot ETF, the most users and transactions, more attractive decentralization and a deflationary function.
Additionally, the market capitalizations of the two cryptocurrencies are separated by many billions of dollars. While all Solana tokens were recently worth $39.95 billion, the value of all Ether coins was $295.61 billion (as of January 20, 2024).
Editorial team finanzen.net