Ethereum (ETH) has seen a five-times increase in developers contributing to the open-source project in this crypto bear market compared to what it was in 2018.

According to a report by Electric Capital, the number of Ethereum monthly active developers increased from 1,084 in 2018 to 5,819 in 2022. Bitcoin monthly active developers also increased from 372 to 946.

The report also said there are 23,343 monthly blockchain developers as of December 2022. On top of that, open source-crypto projects see over 471,000 monthly code commits every month and an all-time high of over 61,000 developers contributing code for the first time in 2022.

More importantly, the crypto space saw an 8% Year-on-Year (YoY) increase in full-time developers. Electric Capital said it’s the most important “growth signal” since full-time developers make 76% of code commits.

The Electric Capital report also highlighted that 72% of all monthly active developers work outside the Ethereum and Bitcoin ecosystems. For example, Solana, NEAR, and Polygon grew by 40% YoY and had more than 500 monthly active developers.

On top of that, Sui, Aptos, Starknet, Mina, Osmosis, Hedera, Optimism, and Arbitrum have over 100 monthly active developers, which is a 50% YoY increase. 

However, it’s important to note that while Polygon, Starknet, Optimism, and Arbitrum are separate projects from Ethereum, they work towards scaling Ethereum and are closely tied to the blockchain.

As for decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, 3,901 developers work across different blockchains, a 240% increase since the so-called DeFi summer in 2020. The NFT sector has also grown by 299% since 2021, with over 900 developers contributing monthly.

Ethereum is widely known as the only sufficiently decentralized smart contract blockchain. High developer activity is important to scale Ethereum to the masses.