Dappros has tracked the worldwide blockchain developer population since 2018, when we published our original developer headcount study. We followed up with refreshed data in 2020 and a more comprehensive 2023 update covering worldwide blockchain and Web3 developer statistics. This post is a mid-2024 check-in on where the developer population stands and what’s quietly changed under the surface.
The big picture
The total blockchain developer population has continued its multi-year growth trajectory through the first half of 2024. The pace is no longer the post-2021 hype-cycle surge we tracked in 2022–2023, but it is clearly not a contraction either. Developer activity on the major ecosystems remains healthy, while the composition of “who counts as a blockchain developer” has quietly evolved.
Where the developers are working
- Ethereum and the EVM ecosystem — still the largest single bucket. Layer 2 development (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base) has absorbed a meaningful share of the growth, while mainnet itself remains the anchor.
- Solana — the strongest year-over-year ecosystem growth signal in 2024, on the back of consumer apps and DePIN projects pulling in engineers from outside the traditional blockchain world.
- Cosmos and the appchain world — steady. The Cosmos SDK and CosmWasm continue to attract sovereignty-conscious teams that want their own L1.
- Bitcoin ordinals and L2s — a genuinely new developer bucket since 2023, smaller in absolute terms but with non-trivial momentum.
The “AI-adjacent” developer is the new sub-category
The most interesting shift we see going into the second half of 2024 isn’t within blockchain per se — it’s the emergence of a new hybrid: developers building AI agents that need wallets, on-chain identities, and the ability to transact autonomously. Most of these engineers don’t call themselves “blockchain developers” yet, but they’re touching the same primitives — accounts, signing, on-chain registries, token standards.
We expect this hybrid role to be the single fastest-growing sub-category in the data we collect for 2025.
What it means for hiring
If you’re building a blockchain or Web3 team in late 2024, the most expensive missing skill is often AI/LLM literacy rather than Solidity fluency. The reverse is also true: AI-product teams increasingly find they need someone who understands EVM mechanics to ship agent-enabled products. The cleanest hires sit on that overlap.
Geographic patterns hold
The geographic distribution we saw in our 2023 study is broadly stable: the US, India, China, the UK, Germany, and Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Poland, Romania) remain the largest source pools by absolute headcount. Per capita, Singapore, the UAE, and Switzerland continue to punch above their weight thanks to a combination of regulatory clarity and capital concentration.
The practical implication for businesses
If you’re commissioning a Web3 product in late 2024, the takeaways are:
- Pure Solidity skills are no longer scarce — most engineering teams can find or train them.
- The bottleneck is product judgment (knowing what to ship) and the integration work that touches AI, infrastructure, and traditional backend.
- For chat, messaging, or AI-agent features, building from scratch is rarely the right call. Reaching for a proven open-source stack is faster and lower-risk.
We’ll publish a fuller 2024 year-end retrospective in early 2025, then return to a full 2025 update later in the year.
Related from Ethora: Ethora — the chat and AI agent SDK built on years of Dappros R&D.