Ethereum remains the leading platform for blockchain developers, with more than 16,000 new developers joining the ecosystem between January and September 2025, according to the Ethereum Foundation, citing data from Electric Capital.
This influx solidifies Ethereum’s dominance as the world’s most actively developed blockchain, supported by its growing network of layer 2 solutions.
Solana follows Ethereum with 11,500 developers
Solana ranked second with around 11,500 new developers contributing code this year.
However, the Solana Foundation noted that Electric Capital’s data set could be outdated and underestimate the true numbers.
In comparison, Bitcoin attracted around 7,500 new developers during the same period.
According to Electric Capital’s developer tracker, Ethereum now hosts the largest active developer base in any blockchain ecosystem, with 31,869 active developers.
Solana follows with 17,708, while Bitcoin is at 11,036. Ethereum’s figure includes contributors to layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Unichain, as defined by L2Beat, not counting developers working on multiple layers twice.
Despite Ethereum’s lead, Solana’s growth over the past two years has been much stronger.
Full-time Ethereum developers grew 5.8% year-over-year, while Solana saw a 29.1% increase over the same period and a 61.7% increase over two years, one of the fastest expansions in the industry.
However, the number of Solana developers may be higher than expected. The foundation’s developer relations manager, Jacob Creech, said about 7,800 developers were missing from the current data set, urging the community to submit GitHub repositories to improve Solana tracking.
Some analysts have also taken issue with Electric Capital’s methodology, arguing that ecosystems using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), such as Polygon and BNB Chain, should be grouped together, since their developers share programming tools and standards.
Adding to the debate, Jarrod Watts, Australian lead for the Layer 2 Abstract project, suggested that AI-assisted code generation and hackathon projects could inflate the overall figures.
“This data probably includes a ton of ambient coding slops and hackathon repositories that will never be touched again,” he said.
Latin American developers flock to Ethereum and Polygon
As noted, developers in Latin America are increasingly relying on established blockchains like Ethereum and Polygon instead of creating new base layer protocols, according to a report from Sherlock Communications.
Ethereum leads regional activity, accounting for more than 75% of blockchain transactions, while Polygon’s share has almost doubled to 20%.
Developers cited transparency, ease of use, and regulatory clarity as the main reasons they chose mature ecosystems over newer ecosystems.
According to Sherlock researcher Luiz Eduardo Abreu Hadad, the Latin American developer community demonstrates “strong technical maturity” and is increasingly interested in solving real-world problems rather than reinventing infrastructure.
On-chain data from 697,000 transactions in countries like Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru supports this trend.
Local projects such as Núclea Chain and RBB in Brazil, however, highlight the region’s potential to build its own blockchain infrastructure.
The post Ethereum leads with 16,000 new developers in 2025, Solana follows with 11,500 appeared first on Cryptonews.
