Compared to October of last year, the monthly active developer count has decreased by 28%. However, there are a few that are going against this trend.
Starknet by StarkWare and zkSync by Matter Labs are two DeFi solutions aimed at scaling Ethereum through zero-knowledge rollups. According to reports, they are among the few platforms that have increased their monthly active developers over the past year.
While some Ethereum counterparts like Polygon and Solana saw declines of 23%, 43%, and 57%, respectively, during the same period, Starknet and zkSync increased that number by 3% and 6%, respectively. This is shown in a report issued on Oct. 1.
The monthly count of active developers in October 2022 was 26,701, and over the past 12 months, this number decreased to 19,279, demonstrating the bearish trend with a 27.7% drop.
While the trend reversal was not unique to Starknet and zkSync, as other platforms like Chainlink, Stellar, Ripple, and Aztec Protocol also reversed the bearish trend, they had fewer developers.
The Future of Ethereum Scalability
Starknet has been focusing on its “Quantum Leap” since July. In theory, it allows increasing the transactions per second of Ethereum (TPS) from about 13-15 transactions to a consistent 37 TPS, and even reaching up to 90 transactions per second.
Along with zkSync, they have also been working on the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) to enhance Ethereum scalability in 2023.
Another zkSync project in development, which they plan to have operational by the end of this year, is the network of “hyperchains.” With this project, they aim to create an ecosystem of sovereign chains and interoperable protocols as part of their zero-knowledge technology stack.
Another way to understand the fluctuation in the number of active developers was proposed by Electric Capital software engineer, Enrique Herreros. He states in a thread on the X platform (formerly Twitter) that many departing developers are newcomers, while those with some experience and established developers tend to stay steady.
He defines this as a cyclical trend where newcomers dominate the developer market during bull markets but start to decline as prices fall.
.@electriccapital’s Developer October Update is here! This is a lighter weight update as we prepare for our annual report.
We inspected 164M+ crypto commits to find:
• 19.3K monthly active open source developers as of October 1, 2023
• Developers have decreased -27% YoY
•… pic.twitter.com/bHyMHx29El— Enrique ⚡ (@eherrerosj) October 18, 2023
