Blockchain is not only a technology, but an ecosystem and philosophy on its own, requiring new programming languages and paradigms. From on-chain VMs to zero-knowledge proving, blockchain introduces many novel ideas to its developers.

Here, it is also important to distinguish between regular programming languages and blockchain related stacks. Blockchain is a fundamentally different execution environment. Unavailability of native privacy, possibility of distributed computation or lack of central source of truth requires developers to think many usual computer science concepts from scratch, making developing with blockchain even harder.

Thus, it is of vital importance to be able to find, understand and categorize existing blockchain developers and development trends. Or else blockchain will never reach the adoption that it requires to replace the trends of the centralized internet.

Blockchain companies and foundations spend millions of dollars each year on hackathons, grant programs and developer workshops. However, the feedback that they can get on their spending is limited to basic metrics that can reach them. Specifically:

BDR solves all these problems by indexing the entire public GitHub archive, and then analyzing and recording all possible trends and distributions on this data.

It is important to emphasize that BDR is an automated tracker software, finding all blockchain related programming languages, meta languages or packages through regular searching over public repository archives. This makes the data provided by BDR almost complete, and allows foundations to learn about a small hobby project that a freelance developer made over the weekend in some corner of the world, even if this developer has never joined any blockchain related community before.

The second most important aspect of the BDR is the detailed analyzer software that we run over this data. We do not only provide the number of new repositories or developers, but track all developers starting from their first interaction with the blockchain ecosystem. This allows us to provide derived data, such as returning developers, reactivating trends, or emerging ecosystems. Moreover, BDR maps these activities across ecosystems and geographical information, creating a very accurate picture of what a blockchain developer ecosystem is looking like.

As node101, we have organized hundreds of blockchain events across the globe, educated tens of blockchain developers and shipped many decentralized products on the mainnet. And during this time of learning and building, the most important problem of the blockchain developer ecosystem became obvious to us: No one truly understands blockchain developers.

We believe that in this time that data is becoming more and more important, indexing the publicly available data is more crucial than ever. To this goal, we have built BDR only with our own power, and now are presenting it to the usage of the entire community.

We hope that the data and work that we have here will empower many great technologies of the future.

Blockchain is about human rights, and a project that is serving blockchain developers and the ecosystem should respect their rights before anything else.

We want to emphasize that all the data we provide here is coming from public sources, already available freely on the internet. Moreover, we do not provide any individual’s information as it is on the BDR website, and include their analytics only in composed data forms, such as visual graphics.

Any developers that are concerned about their rights may reach us from hello@node101.io, requesting their data available on BDR to be removed completely from any derived analyses. We will review and respond to such requests as quickly as possible.

For future information, you can consult our privacy policy.

We thank you for being a part of the blockchain developer ecosystem.