As the cryptocurrency industry grows more disconnected, new data shows which platforms software developers are flocking to.

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Two years ago, bitcoin dominated the cryptocurrency market, gobbling up 70 % of its marketplace value. But as crypto has ballooned to exceed $ 2 trillion in assets, the industry has fragmented. today, bitcoin ’ s parcel sits below 40 %, and raw crypto networks are popping up every day. One way to sift through the clutter and see where the industry is going is to follow the software developers who build and maintain crypto networks .

“ Developers tend to be pretty rational. If there ‘s something they can play with that has actual utility, developers have this ability to go find that thing, ” says Avichal Garg, a pull off partner at crypto-focused venture firm Electric Capital. He views the number of developers who are working on a crypto network “ as a lead index of where value will be created and accrue over the following 10 years. ”

Garg co-authored a report with Electric Capital partner Maria Shen that reveals which cryptocurrency platforms attracted the most developers in 2021. They used data from GitHub, the go-to on-line depository where developers store their code, to estimate how many engineers work on each platform. Their data underestimates the total number of developers, since it doesn ’ thymine get code that ’ s written privately or the many engineers that work at companies like Coinbase .

Their research says 18,000 active developers ( including both full moon and part time contributors ) are working on cryptocurrency platforms, up from roughly 10,000 a year ago. Garg sees that tide as a validation of the diligence ’ s growth and longevity. Kinjal Shah, an investor at Blockchain Capital, agrees : “ When people are voting with their feet and their time, it ‘s a strong signal that there is something they ’ re build for the long term, ” she says .

Electric Capital ’ s research analyzed closely 500,000 sets of code and 160 million code updates. It compared December 2020 to December 2021 to calculate growth. For the list below, it counted a developer as full prison term if he or she made at least 10 software updates in a calendar month .

The fastest-growing platforms are all competitors to Ethereum, the second-largest crypto network launched in 2015 that has 1,300 wide time developers creating applications on it. Ethereum acts as a decentralized computer that applications can be built on, and it ’ s maintained by more than 5,000 “ nodes ” or computers that help validate transactions. One downside of being so wide distributed is that Ethereum can only process about 15 transactions a second ( the Nasdaq stock market averages about 20,000 transactions per second ), and a single transaction tip can sometimes exceed $ 100 .
All of these aggressive crypto networks take different approaches than Ethereum to decentralization and “ consensus, ” the algorithmic procedure of validating a transaction. They settle transactions faster and have lower fees, and most aren ’ triiodothyronine as widely decentralized as Ethereum .
Korea-based Terra was founded by entrepreneur Do Kwon, 30, and launched four years ago. Its UST “ stable coin ” —a cryptocurrency pegged to the respect of a U.S. dollar–has grown cursorily to reach a market value of $ 10 billion, putting it in the top five stable coins in the global, according to crypto data locate Messari. San Francisco-based Solana surprised many crypto insiders over the past year as it attracted hundreds of developers and vocal support from crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. A kind of applications built on Solana, ranging from crypto trading exchanges and lending products to music apps, have become very popular. Solana ’ s SOL token went from $ 1.85 in January 2021 to $ 170 by the end of the year, hitting a marketplace rate of $ 53 billion .
Near, a protocol founded in the Bay Area in 2017, was launched by Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, two engineers who worked previously on the highly see MemSQL distributed database organization and Google ’ s TensorFlow machine learning platform. Both Solana and Near were built in Rust, a popular program terminology that ’ randomness more widely used than Solidity, which Ethereum is based on. Solana and Near have besides been aggressive about offering grants to software developers if they agree to build applications on their respective systems. Near announced an $ 800 million grant broadcast in October, and former Circle CMO Marieke Flament became the Near Foundation ’ s CEO this year .
One chopine that lost a significant number of developers was EOS, which dropped from about 125 full active developers ( including entire and part time ) in December 2020 to 80 a year later. In 2018, EOS famously ran a $ 4 billion “ initial coin extend ” fund-raise and was former fined $ 24 million by the SEC for running an unregistered security offer. The company didn ’ metric ton admit or deny wrongdoing .
In accession to the fastest-growing networks, Electric Capital ’ s research shows which have the largest count of sum developers. Ethereum has long retained the top blemish, and about one in every four new crypto developers who entered the industry over the death year chose to build on Ethereum.

Update, 1/28/22 : Electric Capital issued a correction to its report card on 1/28/22. stream was unwittingly left off the rankings of the 10 fastest-growing cryptocurrency ecosystems but has been added. Algorand previously ranked tenth and has been removed .