Solana Maintains Strong Developer Activity Despite FTX Collapse

Solana had more than 2,000 active developers in November.
Over 60% of those developers were working on a project solely focused on Solana.

Solana has seen its price fall over 65% since the FTX/Alameda collapse a month ago, but the developer activity on the blockchain appears to be stickier than previously imagined. Multiple reports suggest that the ecosystem is still alive and kicking despite a fall in TVL in the past few weeks.

1. How are you feeling about Solana?
1 = Switching chains
5 = I'm not f**kin leaving pic.twitter.com/Bn0cqvSleA
— Ali () (@analyticalali) November 23, 2022

There is no denying that Alameda and FTX had an instrumental role to play in the initial growth of the Solana ecosystem. The companies invested in some of the biggest Dapps on Solana – MAPS, OXY, RAY – so their fall has also painted the ecosystem negatively. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

What Did the Survey Find?

This survey found that most developers (more than 66%) have decided to stick exclusively with Solana, while a significant majority of developers are deploying on other chains.

According to a report by Messari, the number of GitHub developer repositories and the number of unique daily programs are up 2.5x year-over-year despite SOL prices dropping 95% over the same period. The Web3 developer report published by Alchemy discovered a similar story, with the ecosystem showing a more than 1000% growth in active developer team year-on-year and more than 500% growth in API consumption year-to-date. According to the same report, this growth rate is better than the growth observed on other L1 or L2 alternatives like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

Source: Alchemy Report

However, there are caveats about how some of these numbers are calculated. Since there is no standard way to track the developer metrics, data platforms like Token Terminal can get the numbers wrong.

The True Numbers

Following the confusion around some of the reported numbers, Solana Foundation released a report clarifying their methodology for tracking data. The foundation keeps track of developers using the GitHub API to track projects that use a certain list of libraries relevant to the ecosystem. The report highlighted that over 2,000 active developers were working on projects with a Solana integration (including multi-chain projects), and over 60% of those developers were working on a project that only focused on Solana. These numbers are more in line with the other studies that reported consistently strong developer activity on Solana.

While it is true that the Solana ecosystem has suffered a downturn because of the FTX/Alameda collapse, what’s been left behind is a community of builders committed to expanding the ecosystem. It might be too soon to call the demise of a platform still at the forefront of innovation.

On the Flipside

Metrics around developer activity only paint half a picture, as developers tend to flock to platforms with the most users.
If the Solana ecosystem fails to gain noticeable traction, developers might migrate to other blockchains.