Web3 is not dead. Despite the naysayers and depressed crypto asset prices, Web3 development has literally never been better, according to a new report from Web3 developer platform Alchemy Digital.
While last year may have been the year for price action, 2022 has apparently been the year for building. Fresh data shows that roughly 36% of all smart contracts ever to be verified on the Ethereum blockchain were deployed in 2022.
The number of smart contracts reflect the core usage of DeFi protocols and NFT minting contracts. When these numbers go up, it’s typically a sure fire sign of healthy developer activity.
Alchemy kicked things off with a comparison of the total weekly download activity in two of the most important Web3 libraries: Ethers.js and Web3.js. These libraries are an essential development tool for Web3 developers so their usage shows a fairly accurate cross section of the current development landscape.
Web3 up until now
In 2018, only 146,000 developers installed either of these libraries on a weekly basis. Fast forward to the third quarter of 2022 and we can see this number has grown 10x to a massive 1,536,548 downloads per week.
The report also drew attention to the record figures being set each month by the increasing deployment of new smart contracts across the Web3 ecosystem. Monthly smart contracts grew a little over 160% year over year, with each month witnessing a new all-time-high being reached.
Alchemy also drew attention to a 14% spike in smart contract deployment that occurred following the successful completion of The Merge, suggesting that many developers had been watching and waiting from the sidelines before deploying their projects.
Finally, the report disclosed the number of Decentralised Applications (dApps), with DappRadar estimating that 12,495 dApps currently exist across all chains, up significantly from around 1,000 in 2018. Showing vibrant on-chain usage, more than 2,500 of those dApps report having at least 1 active user in the last 24 hours.
Reports
Alchemy’s report echoed the findings from a Telstra Ventures report earlier this year which also found a strong presence of Web3 development activity throughout Q2.
Using the four-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) as a yardstick, Telstra Ventures found that Ethereum’s contributor community grew at a CAGR of nearly 25%, Solana at 173% and Bitcoin at 17%. Ethereum network development took the number one spot, with nearly 4000 monthly active developers on the network in July.
What this barrage of numbers shows is that despite crypto asset prices falling roughly 70% from their all-time highs in November, there’s a strong, enduring community hard at work building the next generation of Web3 projects.
So yeah, Web3 is actually going just great thanks.
