Alchemy

Web3 devs ‘more active than ever’ amid crypto winter: Report

Consecutive all-time-high smart contract deployments and surging usage of Web3 script libraries mean that Web3 devs are still busy working despite the prolonged market downturn.

Web3 developers don’t appear to be fazed by the crypto bear market, with one Web3 platform suggesting they’re “more active than ever” — particularly on the Ethereum network.

In a new Q3 2022 report on Oct. 13 by Web3 development platform Alchemy, the company said that 2022 could be the “biggest year yet” for Web3 developers.

Around 36% of all smart contracts ever deployed and verified on the blockchain have been in 2022, a count of nearly 118,000 compared to the over 323,700 ever deployed, according to the report.

This is despite the price of Ether (ETH) falling by nearly 66% since the start of the year and the total value locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols falling around 70% year-to-date, according to DappRadar.

Nonfungible token (NFT) trading volumes have also taken a beating, decreasing by 98% since late January.

Alchemy states the deployment of smart contracts increased by 40% from the first quarter of the year with consecutive all-time highs hit every month over the third quarter peaking at 17,376 in September alone.

*Monthly verified smart contracts in Q3 2022. Image:* *Alchemy*

The data also shows smart contract deployments increased by 143% compared to the third quarter of 2021, reaching over 48,500 for the third quarter of 2022.

Alchemy noted that in the two weeks following Ethereum’s Merge — when the blockchain moved from a proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus — smart contract deployment increased by 14%, suggesting some developers may have been waiting for the event to launch their projects.

The company also analyzed the usage of two Web3 script libraries, Ethers.js and Web3.js, which allow developers to read blockchain data and build Web3 products.

The team found the number of developers installing either library had increased by three times that of Q3 2021 to over 1.5 million downloads on average per week.

Although some have claimed this current crypto bear market is a good time to build products in Web3 that hasn’t always been the case in previous cycles.

As evidenced in Alchemy’s data, the 2017 to 2020 bear market saw a 45% decline in smart contract deployments in the middle of the cycle, from 2018 to 2019, although so far that metric has increased by 50% this year from 2021.

Decentralized apps on Polygon hit 37,000, rocketing 400% this year

It comes as the number of monthly active teams for the blockchain reached 11,800 in July, up from 8,000 in March.

The number of decentralized applications (DApps) on Ethereum-scaling-platform Polygon has topped 37,000, marking a 400% increase since the start of 2022.

The Polygon team shared the figures via a Wednesday blog post, which was sourced from partnered Web3 development platform Alchemy, noting that the figure represents the cumulative number of applications ever launched on both the testnet and mainnet.

It also noted that the number of monthly active teams — a measure of developer activity on a blockchain — reached 11,800 at the end of July, up a whopping 47.5% from March.

The project team also highlighted a breakdown of DApp projects which notably showed that “74% of teams integrated exclusively on Polygon, while 26% deployed on both Polygon and Ethereum.”

Polygon’s Ethereum Virtual Machine- (EVM)-compatible proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain hosts DApps from a long list of prominent projects and brands in the crypto space, such as nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea, Metaverse platforms Decentraland and The Sandbox , decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Aave and NFT venture fund/gaming firm Animoca Brands.

The blog post stated that DApp usage on Polygon has seen more than “142 million unique user addresses and $5 billion in assets secured,” with around 1.6 billion transactions processed on the network to date.

Polygon CEO Ryan Wyatt was clearly pleased with the growth, as he took to Twitter to note that “we’re having quite a year at Polygon.”

We’re having quite a year at @0xPolygon

~500 dApps in November, now 37,000+ with 11.8k active teams.

“Many projects are increasingly choosing to build solely on Polygon. Alchemy data shows that 74% of teams integrated exclusively on Polygon”https://t.co/ERiLHJiVdh pic.twitter.com/UzKZPlazWD

— Ryan Wyatt (@Fwiz) August 11, 2022

Earlier this year, the Polygon team cited its partnership with Alchemy as a key driver behind the surging number of DApps being built on the network, as the Web3 platform’s infrastructure makes it “significantly easier for Polygon developers” to build DApps.

“Polygon’s partnership with Alchemy in June 2021 proved to be an adoption catalyst, sending the number of dApps running on the network to 3,000 in October, 7,000 in January, and over 19,000 as of April,” the post read.

The post highlighted Alchemy’s platform tooling, Web3 and DApp infrastructure such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and also Alchemy working “hand-in-hand with Polygon to resolve and mitigate network-level incidents when they occur.”

With the crypto markets showing signs of a potentially bullish recovery of late, Polygon’s native asset, MATIC, has pumped a hefty 66.3% in the past month to sit at $0.92 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko. Its current market cap of $6.9 billion makes MATIC the sixteenth largest asset in crypto.