Watch the developers

where activity is happening, and what that says about coming trends

“Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.” – Bob Dylan ||

Hello everyone, and happy Friday!! I trust you’re all getting into the holiday spirit – you can never start too early, in my opinion. (Actually, I take that back – Christmas decorations in stores before the end of October is too early. Now, however, it’s exciting.)

Today’s email has a ton of charts, as I share highlights from Electric Capital’s latest Crypto Developer Report. You can tell much about coming trends by watching who is doing what and where.

Because the below content is largely chart-driven, I won’t do an audio version today.

IN THIS NEWSLETTER:

• Watch the developers

If you’re not a premium subscriber, I hope you’ll consider becoming one! You get ~daily commentary on markets, tokenization, regulation and other signs that crypto IS impacting the macro landscape. As well as audio, relevant links and music recommendations ‘cos why not.

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Watch the developers

Experienced tech investors know that, to gauge which technologies could break out into mainstream, you need to watch developer attention. Put differently, the areas attracting the most intense talent and work are the applications with the strongest potential. Of course, this only applies once a certain velocity has been achieved, and there are no doubt outliers that remind us this is a guideline not a rule. But, it’s as good an indicator as many. And it applies to blockchain development as well.

Every year, Electric Capital puts out a Crypto Developer Report, looking at the evolution of activity across chains. To produce this, the team combs repositories, analyses code commits, and adjusts for double counting (such as forks and multi-chain developers), data lists (not considered active development) as well as likely bots. It only considers open-source projects (developers on private chains are not included) and those actively writing code, which does leave out tens of thousands more who are also involved in building blockchain applications.

Why is this report relevant? Because it gives a glimpse of which chains are attracting the most talent; in turn, this hints at which communities will produce the greatest number of new apps and/or upgrades, which in turn attract users. This could have an effect on the prices of the chain tokens; what interests me more is the adoption profile and likely integrations, both between chains and with traditional infrastructure.

The 2024 edition has just been released, and it’s a whopping 218 slides. Below I’ll summarize some of the highlights that jumped out at me, but for those in a hurry, the TLDR is: