🚨 Developer Exodus: Major Blockchain Ecosystems See Sharp Drop in Coding Activity (2025 Alert)

Ghost towns replacing GitHub repos? The once-booming developer activity across top blockchain networks is showing cracks—just as institutional money starts pouring in.

The silent code freeze

Commit histories across Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain resemble abandoned construction sites. No hard numbers disclosed, but the trend's clear: builders are voting with their keyboards.

Bear market or broken promises?

While VC-funded foundations keep announcing "ecosystem growth," the actual coders—the ones who make the magic happen—appear to be ghosting. Maybe they finally read those tokenomics whitepapers.

Wall Street's timing is impeccable as always

BlackRock's blockchain ETF launches next week. Nothing boosts confidence like hedge funds buying the dip while devs head for the exits.

Recent developments on blockchain developer engagement indicate an overall downclimb in DevActivity Events and contribution within various prominent blockchain ecosystems. This information highlights the issues currently affecting blockchain development in 2025, with some notable exceptions displaying positive dynamics.

Developers’ Engagement in Leading Blockchain Ecosystems Declines

Ethereum remains the network with the greatest number of events of developer activity of 83.5K, even as the activity fell by a rate of 15.21%. The number of contributors also decreased by 3.6% to 1.3K contributors. BNB Chain continued the trend of the previous months with 39K events, recording an 11.34% drop in activity and 3.44% in contributors.

Polygon recorded 38.4K events, decreasing by 13.59% and the number of contributors moved by 5.58%. Arbitrum and Optimism registered 32.6K and 29.8K events, respectively, seeing a drop in activity and contributor participation. Arbitrum has had a 13.97% contraction in events and a 4.46% contraction in contributors as well, with Optimism having the highest percentage decrease in activity of the top five at 17.97%.

Avalanche and Cosmos had 27.5K and 27K events respectively. Avalanche declined 7.2%  in activity and it is 10.83% fewer contributors. Cosmos, in its turn, had a stable number of contributors and it recorded no alteration in this metric despite the decrease in the activity rate of 11.75%.

Significant Differences in New Ecology

Solana had 22.2K developer activity events which is a decrease of events by 9.23% and an increase in contributors by 1.62%. solana is the only top-ten ecosystem where the trend in developer participation is positive.

The greatest decreases were registered by harmony and Polkadot. The activity on Harmony decreased by 19.46%, and the number of contributors also declined to 6.29%. Polkadot experienced the most significant drop in developer events by 20.66%, and contributor activity decreased by 5.46%.

These figures indicate a general decline of blockchain development activity with a couple of ecosystems, which prove to be resilient or even growing. These trends will also be critical to evaluate the sustainability of the ecosystem in the long term.