Developer Exodus Hits Major Blockchains – But Ethereum Still Reigns Supreme in 2025

Blockchain ecosystems are bleeding devs – yet ETH's dominance defies the trend. Here's why the smart contract king still commands loyalty while rivals scramble.

The great developer drought

Commit counts are tanking across top chains as bear market fatigue sets in. Teams that overpromised during the last bull run now face empty GitHub repositories and broken roadmaps.

Ethereum's unexpected resilience

While Solana and BNB Chain see double-digit declines, Ethereum's mature tooling and DeFi dominance keep builders hooked – proving that network effects matter more than VC hype cycles.

The institutional elephant in the room

Wall Street's tokenization pipe dreams might be propping up ETH's numbers. Because nothing says 'decentralization' like BlackRock's dev team moonlighting as Ethereum core contributors.

The latest data provided by Santiment, a prominent crypto analytical platform, reveals that developer activity has slowed down across major blockchains over the past month. Developer activity is measured in terms of code contributions and developers’ activity on blockchains.

The past month has been crucial in terms of developer activity, yet ethereum is taking the lead and showing significant developer activity as compared to other blockchains. Along with Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Cosmos, and a few others have gained significant attention from the developers and crypto community. 

Ethereum Leads Despite Monthly Developer Activity Drop

Ethereum maintains its legacy and continues to dominate the space with around 82.8k development events, but shows a 10.81% drop over the past month as compared to its previous cycle. In addition to that, contributors also declined by 3.15% to 1.3k. After that, comes BNB Chain that secured the second position with 37.6k events that slowed down by 12.83% and dropped to 728 development contributors.

Other prominent blockchains i.e., Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism have posted sharp declines over the last thirty days, which is around 23%. While one bright blockchain project has popped up, Cosmos, which has gathered 26.5 development events. Though this figure declined by 11.76%, the prominent blockchain sees an increase of 2.37% to 389 developer activity events.

Major Blockchains See Sharp Drop in Development

Avalanche, Solana, Harmony, and Polkadot have faced significant double-digit declines in developer activity last month as contributors’ numbers also contracted. Specifically, Optimism has seen a steep decline in events by 25.37%, closely followed by Arbitrum and Polkadot declined by 24.51% and 24.46% respectively.  

Crypto market analysts believe that such declines often coincide with market uncertainty or a prominent shift in focus from feature expansion to maintenance of blockchains. Still, blockchain platforms like Cosmos position themselves for resistance to the future growth cycle.  In a nutshell, despite such a decline in the developers’ activity, blockchain space is still active and strong activity is expected ahead.