Developers Flock To Crypto Space, Become More Active Despite The 'Great Resignation,' Bearish Market

Web3 developers have become more active and are building "faster than ever" these days despite the ongoing "Great Resignation" and bear markets, according to a blockchain developer platform.

This year is quite a handful for investors, especially for cryptocurrency with a series of events painting a good and bad image of the industry. Investors saw the meteoric collapse of Terra, which was triggered when its algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) depegged from the dollar and followed by the crash of its native token LUNA.

The crash wiped out around $60 billion worth of investments. The cryptocurrency community also witnessed the historic transition of the Ethereum blockchain from proof-of-work into proof-of-stake, which was a long and arduous task intended to make the blockchain more efficient, secure and powerful with reduced gas fees.

Apart from those, the industry saw a series of exploits and hacks, some of which caused the bankruptcy of crypto businesses. Investors were also shocked by a series of resignations among crypto executives and rug pull scandals.

Despite all of those, Web3 developer platform Alchemy reported that developers are "building faster than ever." In a new report, the team shared that Web3 developers would flock to the cryptocurrency space even if the industry's market capitalization was down by about 58% (year-to-date), noting that "2022 has been the biggest year yet."

According to the report, there is a surge in the number of developers downloading critical libraries – Ethers.js and Web3.js, which are essential tools needed to build Web3 products. These libraries enable developers to read data of the blockchain through providers, send transactions to facilitate deposits, create Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and a lot more.

Alchemy reported that while only 146,000 developers installed either Etheres.js or Web3.js weekly in 2018, this number climbed to 1,536,548 downloads per week this year. The surge is ten times the number in 2018 and three times the figure in Q3 of 2021.

"This metric alone points to a large and growing interest in building applications on Ethereum," the report explained. It added that last month, over 17,376 smart contracts were sent by developers to Etherscan, a popular block explorer, showing a massive 160% year-on-year increase.

The report noted the increase in smart contracts suggests "healthy developer activity and growth," underlining that it is indicative of "a surging interest in decentralized protocols." There is also a massive spike in the number of dApps or decentralized apps. There were only around 1,000 such apps in 2018.

DappRadar reported there are now around 12,495 dApps across all chains and 2,500 of them have recorded at least one active user in the last 24 hours. Alchemy said "36% of all smart contracts ever deployed and verified have been in 2022."

Smart contract deployments also skyrocketed a couple of weeks following Ethereum's The Merge, recording a 14% increase. They reportedly "surged 40% to all-time highs" although the price of Ethereum was down by 62%.