I am proud to share that the XDC Network had another increase in full-time developers and total developers on Electric Capital’s most recent developer report. On December 14th, the XDC Network registered 14 full-time developers – although the report ended on December 31st with 12 developers.
Additionally, total developers increased from 34 in October to 37 in the most recent report, resulting in growth for the entire year and throughout four consecutive reports.
Electric Capital also made some enhancements and updates to their reporting that provide additional insight into developers' contributions. Until this most recent report, the only categories for developers were full-time, part-time, and single contribution developers. These metrics are a good way to monitor open-source and public contributions but lack additional insight and details. With the updates made by Electric Capital we are able to identify and monitor five new metrics that provide more details into the type of developers and their experience in a given ecosystem.
The first two metrics are single-chain and multi-chain developers. In the case of XDC Network, single-chain contributors are only contributing to public repositories within the XDC ecosystem. These developers make up the majority of XDC’s total contributors with 36 of 37 classifying as single-chain. This doesn't necessarily mean they're not building with other chains, however, as only public repository contributions are measured.
In addition to single-chain and multi-chain, there are three new metrics that provide insight into the experience level and growth of developers within an ecosystem. These metrics help identify newcomers, emerging, and established developers. Newcomers are identified as developers that have contributed for less than a year, emerging have contributed for 1-2 years, and established more than two years. Collectively, these new metrics allow you to identify and categorize developers more accurately.
Here is an example of how these new metrics can provide better insight into your developer community. If we look at the single-chain and multi-chain numbers, we can see that 36 of 37 total developers on the report are single-chain contributors. Pair that with 16 newcomers, and it could be assumed that the XDC Network might be their first experience building with blockchain technology. This would mean there has been some success in attracting new developers to the XDC Network rather than simply pulling them from other chains. Using such data can be beneficial to the efforts of developer relations, tooling, and communications.
It's important to remember that this data is generated through public repositories monitored by Electric Capital. Private repositories and on-chain data are not available for consideration in the report. Electric Capital would need to be updated with any untracked or new repositories that developers are working on to generate a more accurate report. As I previously mentioned, any development using the blockchain is not available for consideration. So this doesn't necessarily reflect how much is being built within your ecosystem. However, it still provides valuable information, which can be useful to gauge the health and growth of your developer community and ecosystem.
There is a correlation between public developer activity and adoption success amongst the top blockchain ecosystems in the industry. Open-source protocols and public contributions create a collaborative environment between developers of different experience levels, perspectives, and backgrounds. This creates an environment of innovation, trust, accountability, and opportunity.
While the XDC Network has consistently seen a growing number of contributors, there is still a lot of room for growth as reported by Electric Capital. Ecosystems such as Ethereum recorded 2,392 full time developers with many others having hundreds of full time developers. As it currently stands, XDC Network will need to consistently log around 16-17 full time contributors to show up on the first page of Electric Capital’s report. With nearly 40 total developers appearing on the XDC Network’s report, there is potential for more developers to be recognized as full-time by Electric Capital.
Furthermore, total developers should also continue to grow as the new consensus engine, XDC 2.0, has the potential to further position the XDC Network as one of the best performing and most secure blockchains in the industry. With new features such as subnets (which can serve as Layer 2 solutions or self-sovereign networks) coming with the upgrade, the future of XDC Network’s growing developer community will be interesting to watch. I call on everyone to continue doing their part as the ecosystem continues to grow.
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