Solana’s active developer count has declined to more than 96% from 2,453 devs in January to 75 developers at the moment, data from Token Terminal revealed.
According to the data aggregator, SOL emerged as the biggest loser among the top blockchains despite the protocol claiming otherwise.
Zooming out, the number of active developers of mainstream blockchains has plunged from 3,700 in January this year to roughly 1,600 currently.
Token Terminal’s criteria for identifying a “active developer” is the “number of distinct GitHub users that made 1+ commits to the project’s GitHub repositories throughout the past 30 days”
Per financial data portal, the number of daily active developers working on leading blockchains and decentralised applications [dApps] has decresed by about 57% this year.
As of Dec. 14, Ethereum currently has the most daily developers among blockchain protocols and dapps with 192 developers.
With 144 and 143 active developers, respectively, Cardano [ADA] and Cosmos [ATOM] rank second and third. There are presently 18 active developers working on Bitcoin [BTC], the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
The decline can be attributed to investors increasingly becoming more cautious and deploying their money at a slower rate than during 2021’s bull market.
Nevertheless, the number of active developers in the cryptocurrency industry has remained between 1,500 and 1,600, since the middle of the summer. This indicates that a core of committed, well-funded individuals continue to believe in the potential of blockchain technology.
Meanwhile, Solana is in the limelight ever since the FTX collapse as its on-chain activity such as transactions, addresses, and DeFi has taken a beating.
Solana On-Chain Is In Downturn Since The FTX Meltdown
Web3 research firm Yield App Labs published a report on the state of affairs of the Solana network on December 15.
SOL’s on-chain metrics is down by a whopping 98.8% and transactions have reduced by half in just three months.
SOL’s DeFi also does not look promising as the total value locked [TVL] crashed from $1.4 billion to around $400 million since the beginning of September.
Yield App Labs, further highlighted that growing concerns about developer retention:
There are concerns surrounding Solana’s long-term competitiveness on a technical level, and there are worries if the dev and user communities will choose to remain on Solana for the coming months and years in the bear market following the FTX fiasco.