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digital
daily

digital daily: The Devs

The Devs: 2022 was a violent period in the digital ecosystem. Euphoria, panic, liquidation, bankruptcy, all present in a single trip around the sun. Decentralized application development is an exception. Electric Capital puts out an excellent report on developer activity. Web3 tooling company Alchemy publishes another. What insights can we glean from the data? We are six months into the first sustained decline in developer activity in the history of the industry. Notable. However, it is a 10% decline after a doubling since 2021. 50% of builders have less than two years of experience, and most have stayed. Considering the quantum of forced exits and staff reductions, it is a minor decline in developer activity. Activity is also a group metric, making no quality or productivity distinction. Code creation continues apace. It is an efficiency gain for the ecosystem, an imposed discipline from a bear market. Core protocol teams for Bitcoin and Ethereum are stable. But development teams for the top 200 projects are gaining share, rising from 25% to 50% of human capital. The opposite is true for smaller projects, which have shrunk from 50% to 25%. Consolidation. Further productivity improvement is on the way, too. Support tools like GitHub's Copilot and ChatGPT are becoming indispensable sidekicks, reducing errors and helping creative minds filter options. Productive talent is forming organically in a digital ecosystem that is still underserved. Applications are built on longer cycles than the market's attention span. The building continues.

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