The 2024 Electric Capital Developer Report shows promising development trends in the Solana ecosystem. But what are the implications for Eclipse?
The report presents a fairly complex picture: While crypto developers have grown 39% annually since Ethereum's 2015 launch, with 39,148 new developers joining in 2024, overall growth has slowed. Total developer numbers actually declined 7% last year, indicating significant churn in the ecosystem.
At the same time the number of experienced developers is at all-time highs, growing 27% YoY and contributing 70% of code commits, according to the report. This is encouraging, as seasoned developers and repeat founders are more likely to create breakout apps, driving Eclipse and the industry forward.
EVM Fragmentation
There is a great deal of talk about Ethereum fragmentation. Fragmentation comes in many forms — people talk about fragmented user bases across the many EVM-based rollups and the L1. Similarly, fragmentation on the liquidity front is notable, with significant pools of capital being stuck on Ethereum mainnet.
Fragmentation is often brought up in the context of user bases, distribution, and liquidity. These represent significant concerns, but an under-emphasized form of fragmentation is developer attention fragmentation - which is rampant on EVM based platforms today. As a result, we see a steady shift in new code emerging from chains other than the Ethereum mainnet. Fragmentation of this sort leads to tough decisions for developers both financially and technologically. Often, deployment incentives dictate the decision making process.
There is also the issue of compatibility and equivalence affecting rollups and forcing developers to co-test on multiple platforms lest they introduce latent bugs, issues, etc. As a result, tools like Hardhat 3 provide L2 network simulation to support cross-rollup porting and development.
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The Benefits of Building on the SVM
Fragmentation around the EVM is one of the reasons why developers are embracing the SVM and Solana. 2024 has been an exceptional year for Solana growth, as the two graphs from the Electric capital development report exemplify. They show tremendous excitement and new developers trying the SVM tooling and programming model, which is something that Eclipse benefits from as well.
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At the same time, these are still the early innings in terms of growth — the number of monthly active developers hovers around 3K, but most are part-time, with fewer than 600 full-time developers on Solana.
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There is significant untapped growth potential. Many part-time developers could transition to full-time roles if app development becomes more financially sustainable. At Eclipse, we are working on MEV redistribution ideas that could enable developers to earn a fair share of revenue generated from state created by their apps.
Additionally, we see many more developers exploring the ecosystem compared to the number who are monthly active contributors. This gap represents an opportunity: we must improve our onboarding experience and tooling.
The Explosive Growth of Rust as a Language
SVM development largely targets Rust programmers. We believe that this gives Eclipse a hidden unlock. The Rust development ecosystem has expanded radically in the last several years, with the number of developers in late 2024 approaching 4 million, based on a report from Developer Nation. Compared to prior years, we are on the verge of hockey-stick growth for the Rust language. While Rust is used for many applications, from operating system programming to cryptography, only a small fraction of Rust developers are in Web3.
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At the same time, there’s some level of developer migration across the different ecosystems, especially Rust-based ecosystems; some of them are making their way into the SVM and Solana ecosystems.
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We are aiming to bring more developers with experience from outside the Web3 bubble to unlock significant growth. Several thousand Rust developers deploying and continuing to develop on Eclipse is very likely to result in major breakout apps.
Eclipse’s Plans
To us at Eclipse Labs, the observations above serve as a call to action. Our approach to getting these outcomes consists of several elements:
- outreach to the Rust community outside of blockchain to identify promising developers and potential teams
- providing the best-in-class developer onboarding experience on Eclipse
- building the best-in-class developer tooling to help with application testing, debugging, and profiling
Conclusion
In short, the potential to drastically expand the Eclipse developer ecosystem is enormous, in part because of the explosively growing popularity of Rust as a language. As such, one of the keys to Eclipse’s success is to get an increasing number of experienced Rust developers to build on Eclipse. This is enabled by our goals to build the best-of-class development experience around the SVM.
Interested in Building on Eclipse?
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