Ethereum remains the leading hub for blockchain developers, with over 16,000 new developers joining the ecosystem between January and September 2025, according to the Ethereum Foundation, citing data from Electric Capital.
The influx reinforces Ethereum’s dominance as the world’s most actively developed blockchain, supported by its expanding network of layer-2 solutions.
Solana Trails Ethereum with 11,500 Developers
Solana ranked second with roughly 11,500 new developers contributing code this year.
However, the Solana Foundation noted that Electric Capital’s dataset may be outdated and undercounts actual figures.
Bitcoin, in comparison, attracted around 7,500 new developers over the same period.
According to Electric Capital’s developer tracker, Ethereum now hosts the largest active developer base across all blockchain ecosystems, with 31,869 active developers.
Solana follows with 17,708, while Bitcoin trails at 11,036. Ethereum’s figure includes contributors to layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Unichain, as defined by L2Beat, without double-counting developers working across multiple layers.
Despite Ethereum’s lead, Solana’s growth over the past two years has been far stronger.
Full-time Ethereum developers grew by 5.8% year-on-year, while Solana recorded a 29.1% increase in the same period and a 61.7% surge over two years, one of the fastest expansions in the industry.
Still, Solana’s developer count may be higher than reported. The foundation’s head of developer relations, Jacob Creech, said around 7,800 developers are missing from the current dataset, urging the community to submit GitHub repositories to improve Solana’s tracking.
Some analysts have also challenged Electric Capital’s methodology, arguing that ecosystems using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), such as Polygon and BNB Chain, should be grouped together, since their developers share tools and programming standards.
Adding to the debate, Jarrod Watts, head of Australia for layer-2 project Abstract, suggested that AI-assisted code generation and hackathon projects could be inflating the overall figures.
“This data likely includes a tonne of vibe coding slop and hackathon repos that are never touched again,” he said.
Latin America’s Developers Flock to Ethereum and Polygon
As reported, developers across Latin America are increasingly building on established blockchains like Ethereum and Polygon instead of creating new base-layer protocols, a report from Sherlock Communications found.
Ethereum leads regional activity, accounting for more than 75% of blockchain transactions, while Polygon’s share nearly doubled to 20%.
Developers cited transparency, ease of use, and regulatory clarity as key reasons for choosing mature ecosystems over newer ones.
According to Sherlock researcher Luiz Eduardo Abreu Hadad, Latin America’s developer community shows “strong technical maturity” and a growing focus on solving real-world problems rather than reinventing infrastructure.
On-chain data from 697,000 transactions in countries including Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru supports this trend.
Local projects like Brazil’s Núclea Chain and RBB, however, highlight the region’s potential to build its own blockchain infrastructure.
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