GitHub Data Leak Reveals Massive Exodus of Crypto Developers Post-2022, AI Emerges as Developers' New Destination

BlockBeats News, March 12th, according to data from GitHub, the world's largest code hosting platform, the blockchain ecosystem is facing a comprehensive developer drain, while AI projects have dominated the platform's growth.

According to data from the analytics platform Artemis, since early 2025, the weekly volume of crypto-related code committed to code repositories has dropped by about 75%, from about 850,000 commits to 210,000; the number of active developers has decreased by 56% to around 4,600. Code repositories are where developers track code writing, build tools, and launch new projects, and are one of the clearest signals of software innovation trends.

This contraction contrasts sharply with the overall software ecosystem's growth. GitHub's Octoverse report shows that in just one year, around 36 million developers were added to GitHub in 2025, surpassing 180 million global users, with a year-over-year increase of about 25% in platform-wide code commits. Most of this growth has flowed into the field of artificial intelligence. GitHub currently hosts over 4.3 million AI-related repositories.

Over the past year, the number of repositories importing large language model software development toolkits has surged by about 178% to over 1.1 million. Meanwhile, generative AI projects have attracted over 1 million contributors per month. These data indicate that developers are reallocating their time from blockchain to AI infrastructure.

Repositories of Jupyter Notebooks, commonly used for machine learning experiments, have grown by about 75%. Dockerfile repositories for deploying AI applications have seen a sharp increase of about 120%. TypeScript, the programming language that underpins modern web development and numerous AI tools, has added over 1 million contributors in a year, surpassing Python and JavaScript to become the most commonly used language on GitHub.

In the cryptocurrency field, the decline in developer numbers is widespread but varying in severity. Artemis data shows that the weekly active developer count for Ethereum has dropped by 34% over three months to 2,811; Solana decreased by 40% to 942; and Base, a Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase and once one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in 2024, plummeted by 52% to 378.

The emerging public chains that attracted speculative interest during last year's bull market fared the worst. Aptos lost about 60% of its developers, BNB Chain's code commits plummeted by 85%, and Celo declined by 52%. The only category currently experiencing growth is wallet infrastructure, with a growth of about 6% in weekly active developers, reaching 308.

However, data also shows that the crypto space may be going through consolidation rather than a collapse. Electric Capital's annual developer report indicates that the industry reached a peak of around 31,000 monthly active developers in 2022, dropping to around 23,600 in 2024, further declining to around 18,000 by mid-2025.

The composition of the remaining developers is also changing. The number of developers with over two years of experience has grown by approximately 27% year over year, currently contributing about 70% of the code commits. The ones lost are mostly part-time contributors and newcomers with less than 12 months of experience, a group that decreased by 58% over a tracking period.