How Many Blockchain Developers Are There in the World?
Electric Capital's 2024 Developer Report counted roughly 23,600 monthly active developers contributing to open source crypto projects as of late 2024, down from about 31,000 in 2022. The figure counts only people authoring commits to public repositories in a given month, so developers working in closed source codebases are missing and the true total is higher.
The short answer, with its source
Nobody counts every blockchain developer, so any number depends on who did the counting and how. The most cited source is the Developer Report published by Electric Capital, a venture firm that has tracked open source crypto development annually since 2018.
Its 2024 report, released in December 2024, found roughly 23,600 monthly active developers contributing to open source crypto projects. Blockworks, reporting on the release, gave the figure as 23,613 as of November 2024 and noted it was down from a high of about 31,000 in 2022. Electric Capital's own summary describes total developers as down 7% year over year.
What that number actually counts
The figure is narrower than the phrase blockchain developers suggests. According to Electric Capital's methodology page:
Open source only. The report reads public code repositories. Developers working only in private codebases, at exchanges, banks, enterprises, or startups that keep their code closed, are not counted. Maria Shen, a General Partner at Electric Capital, told Decrypt the study has to undercount because it looks at open source activity only.
Code authors, not reviewers. A developer counts when they author commits. Merging someone else's pull request does not count on its own.
Monthly active. Activity is measured over a rolling 28 day window, which gives a snapshot of people coding in a given month, not everyone who has ever written a smart contract.
Filtered for noise. Forked code merged from upstream projects, bot accounts, and duplicate accounts belonging to one person are removed.
The report also classifies contributors by how often they commit. Its methodology defines a full-time developer as someone who commits code on 10 or more days in a rolling 28 day period, with part-time and one-time categories below that.
Other figures from the 2024 report
Experienced developers grew. Electric Capital reported that developers with two or more years in crypto rose 27% year over year and wrote about 70% of the code, even as the total fell.
New developers fell. Cointelegraph reported 39,148 new developers exploring crypto during 2024, down 7% on the prior year. Solana attracted the most new developers at 7,625, ahead of Ethereum at 6,456, though Ethereum remained the largest ecosystem overall.
Geography shifted. Decrypt reported that Asia accounted for 32% of crypto developer activity in 2024, up from 12% in 2015, while North America fell from 43% to 24% over the same period. By country, the United States held 18.7% and India 11.7%.
Multi-chain work is common. Electric Capital's summary says about one in three crypto developers work on more than one chain.
Scale of the data. The 2024 edition analysed 902 million commits across 1.7 million repositories.
Why figures for the same year disagree
Searching this question turns up conflicting numbers, and the reason is mostly methodology. In January 2024, Fortune reported Electric Capital data showing 22,266 monthly active open source crypto developers at the end of 2023, down from about 29,600 a year earlier. The 2024 report's 7% decline, however, implies a 2023 baseline near 25,400.
The likely explanation is coverage. Electric Capital maps repositories to ecosystems through its public crypto-ecosystems data set, and that set keeps growing: the 2023 edition analysed about 818,000 repositories, the 2024 edition 1.7 million. When more historical repositories are tagged, past years are recounted. Compare figures within one edition of the report, not across editions.
Putting the number in context
Blockworks compared the 2024 figure against an estimate of about 27 million software developers worldwide, which makes open source crypto developers a small fraction of one percent. That comparison overstates how small the field is, because the crypto count excludes closed source work, while it does show how specialised the talent pool is.
For hiring, the small, measurable pool has two practical consequences. Experienced contract and protocol engineers are relatively scarce and receive frequent outreach. And because the counted developers work in public, their commit histories are visible, which is one reason web3 hiring leans so heavily on reviewing public code.
What about 2025 and later
Electric Capital published annual reports from 2018 through 2024 and now also runs a live dashboard on developerreport.com, drawing on its Open Dev Data platform. A full-year 2025 report in the same format could not be confirmed when this page was written, so for figures after 2024 check that dashboard directly, and note which definition, monthly active or full-time, any number you quote uses. Other analytics firms publish their own developer counts using different metrics, such as weekly committers, which are not directly comparable.
Frequently asked questions
- How many blockchain developers are there in the world?
- Electric Capital's 2024 Developer Report counted roughly 23,600 monthly active developers contributing to open source crypto projects as of late 2024, down from about 31,000 in 2022. That count excludes developers who work only in closed source code, so the true number of people doing blockchain development is higher than the report shows.
- What does monthly active developer mean in the Electric Capital report?
- It means a person who authored original code commits to a tracked open source crypto repository within a rolling 28 day window. Forked code, bots, and duplicate accounts are filtered out. It is a measure of people actively coding in a given month, not of everyone with blockchain skills or every developer employed at a crypto company.
- Is the number of blockchain developers growing or shrinking?
- By Electric Capital's count, the total fell from a 2022 high of about 31,000 monthly active developers to roughly 23,600 in 2024, a 7% drop in the final year. Developers with two or more years of experience grew 27% over the same year, so the pool is smaller but more experienced. Check the live dashboard for later figures.
- Which country has the most blockchain developers?
- According to Electric Capital's 2024 data as reported by Decrypt, the United States had the largest share of crypto developers at 18.7%, followed by India at 11.7%. By continent, Asia led with 32% of developer activity, ahead of North America at 24%. These shares describe open source contributors only, not every blockchain developer.