Solana’s Developer Retention Rate Soars 50% In 3 Months: Report

The Solana developer ecosystem showed consistent growth over the last 12 months, the Solana Foundation said in its recent report. An average of 2500-3000 monthly active developers built on the Solana blockchain throughout 2023, data showed.

According to the report, Solana’s ecosystem has been in the pink of the health, maintaining a steady monthly active developer count over the past year. Furthermore, the Solana Foundation went on to claim that it was probably “underestimating” the number of active developers, as the measurement only took into account developers contributing to public repositories, and not those in private repositories.

Decoding Plight of Solana’s Developer Ecosystem

However, data provided by Electric Capital’s blockchain development tracker Developer Report tells a different story. As per the report, only 946 developers were building on Solana as of October last year. That’s less than half of the developer count of 2,634 reported in December 2022 — the highest in Solana’s history.

Solana’s developer ecosystem continued to shrink throughout 2023, Developer Report said, citing data from GitHub. Monthly active developers in crypto have declined overall since July 2023.

Nevertheless, Solana now claims to be the second-largest ecosystem in terms of monthly active developers, lagging behind Ethereum. For context, Ethereum boasted 5,769 monthly active developers on October 1, 2023 — 22% lower than the all-time figures of 7,433 reported on June 16, 2022, according to data from Electric Capital.

Developer Retention Up 50% Over Last 3 Months

Meanwhile, Solana saw a 50% jump in developer retention over the last three months. This comes in the backdrop of increasing network activity on Solana’s network and a surge in prices of the native Solana token.

After falling to $96 last week, Solana’s (SOL) price rallied over 11% over the last 24 hours to $100.69, sending its market cap soaring to $43.4 billion. The token has appreciated a whopping 518% from a year ago, largely due to the hype around SOL-based meme coins. Trading volumes in the past 24 hours rose over 42%, indicating growing institutional interest in the token.