Original Title: "The 2023 State of the Solana Developer Ecosystem"

Original Source: Solana Foundation

Translated by: 0x711, BlockBeats

The Solana developer ecosystem continues to grow. In 2023, the developer ecosystem made significant progress in tools, developer experience, content quality, and diversity of available programming languages. Today, the Solana developer ecosystem has over 2500 monthly active open source library developers, with professional developers continuously joining the ecosystem and the development environment becoming increasingly mature.

Developer Ecosystem

The health of the developer ecosystem of any blockchain is crucial for maintaining the network. Although measuring the health of an ecosystem is extremely difficult and there is no single factor that can tell the whole story, the following indicators are crucial for evaluation:

- Monthly active open source developers: The monthly active open source developers who contribute to the ecosystem.

- Developer retention rate: The "stickiness" of ecosystem cultivation and continuous development.

- Developer experience level: The professional experience of the developer.

- Developer Growth: The number of developers entering the ecosystem at any given time.

Monthly Active Developers Total

One of the simplest ways to measure how a network is growing is by the number of active developers on the blockchain. At Solana Foundation, we use an open-source service to collect developer data and have publicly recorded how we collect this data. Over the past year, we have had approximately 2500-3000 developers continuously active on Solana throughout 2023.

2023 Developer Monthly Active Data

Maintaining a certain number of developers is an important indicator of a healthy ecosystem, as it demonstrates the ecosystem's ability to attract and retain new talent. It should be noted that this data only counts developers who contribute to public repositories and does not take into account developer activity in personal repositories. This may lead to an underestimation of the number of active developers at certain points in time. The Solana Foundation is committed to supporting the growth of the open-source community on the Solana blockchain, and continued support for public development will help drive future innovation in Solana applications.

Developer retention rate

Measuring monthly active developers is just part of the story. A large number of developers experimenting with blockchain may not convert into a sustainable developer community if retention rates are low. Low retention rates pose a risk of developers leaving before making meaningful contributions to the network. To further assess the health of the developer community, it is important to measure retention rates in conjunction with monthly active developers. For the purposes of this report, a developer is defined as retained if they make at least one code commit in three consecutive months after starting.

2023 Developer Monthly Retention Rate Data

In 2023, the retention rate of developers in the Solana ecosystem increased from 31% to over 50%, which resulted in more developers staying in the ecosystem. The increase in retention rate may be due to several reasons:

- Developer integration is being improved.

- Solana blockchain has become a more definite choice for developers.- Opportunities in the ecosystem have increased.

In the past year, with the Solana Foundation releasing multiple new guides on how to get started, the Solana developer onboarding process has been steadily improving. Through various developer bootcamps with different focuses and difficulties, 400-500 senior developers graduate every 6 months with the intention of building on Solana. Data from the latest Solana Hyperdrive hackathon shows that about 50% of the top 150 submitters and winners completed one of these bootcamps. Teams in the ecosystem also strongly support building on Solana. For example, the Helius team published a blog post explaining why developers should choose to build on Solana. Although the opportunities provided to developers in the ecosystem are difficult to measure, the number of jobs posted on jobs.solana.com is steadily increasing, which aggregates job postings in the Solana ecosystem. From 15 in January 2023 to 95 at the time of publication, 41 jobs were added in December 2023 alone. Although this is an imperfect metric, job opportunities are crucial for retaining new talent and contributing to the network's growth.

Developer Experience Level

The skill level of developers building applications on the chain directly affects the overall success of the network. If a network is primarily built by more experienced developers, the likelihood of its applications gaining new users is higher. In Solana, over half of the developers entering the ecosystem have at least 3 years of experience, leading them to make higher-level contributions to applications built on the network. One way to measure this is to measure the experience level of attendees at Hacker House events held around the world by Solana. These events serve as spaces for learning and networking, with lectures and office hours specifically geared towards developers and founders. Of the 1,059 developers who attended Solana Hacker House in 2023, 52.5% indicated that they have more than 3 years of developer experience, more than any other group in our events.

Developer experience level data

Developer Growth

Although the Solana ecosystem is relatively new (the Solana mainnet test version was launched in March 2020), its developer ecosystem has grown to become the second largest ecosystem in terms of monthly active developers, according to Developer Report. This growth is due to many different factors, and it is difficult to pinpoint what has caused most developers to join. Since the launch of the mainnet test version, the Solana Foundation has launched or funded various initiatives, with the core goal of developing the developer ecosystem. Some key initiatives include Solana hackathons, Solana Hacker House, Breakpoint, educational training camps, and sponsored university events. Ecosystem-led teams such as SuperteamDAO, mtnDao, Metcamp, and Gen3 have also contributed to this growth. We expect Solana hackathons to become an important indicator of the health of the developer ecosystem. Since 2020, the Solana Foundation has sponsored 8 hackathons. Over the past three years, more than 3,000 projects have been launched, raising over $600 million in funding for projects submitted to hackathons. As each hackathon progresses, the number of project submissions increases. The recent hackathon "Solana Hyperdrive" received over 900 submissions.

Hackathon submission count

Global Growth

It should be noted that although the entire ecosystem is growing, a large amount of growth comes from newly added global regions. The efforts of the global developer ecosystem come from the bottom-up community concept, and these communities are expanding outward. An example is SuperteamDao, a builder community focused on India. SuperteamDao began expanding to other countries/regions in early 2023 and now has branches in 8 countries/regions. Other groups adopting similar concepts include Gen3 in Taiwan, MetacampDao in Singapore, and mtnDao in the United States. Although the Solana Foundation does not track detailed regional growth on a daily basis, the Solana hackathon held every six months can show growth rates at the regional level. In the recent Solana hackathon "Solana Hyperdrive", participants came from 151 countries, and 65 countries submitted final works.

Historically, the United States has always been the country with the most representatives in Solana hackathons, followed closely by India. In recent years, the percentage of submissions from countries outside the US has increased significantly, from 76% in 2021 to 91% in Hyperdrive. The developer community has always been a priority focus for countries with strong engineering talent, such as India, Germany, China, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Vietnam. Countries worth noting include Brazil and the entire Latin America region, Japan, France, Nigeria, and Israel.

As the most mature region in the Solana ecosystem, the United States still dominates among hackathon winners, but these numbers continue to change. Ultimately, the goal for any developer ecosystem should be high-quality projects evenly distributed globally.

- Freecodecamp

- EasyA - IdeaSoft

- Web3BuildersAllianace

- Encode Club

- Ackee Blockchain

- Narr8ative

- Calyptus

- DevsNest

- RiseIn

- Nas Academy

- Developer Impact: Measured by the percentage of developers using programming languages or UI frameworks in the developer community.

New developers entering the ecosystem can now fully join Solana's building by only writing Typescript (without learning Rust or writing Solana smart contracts). Not only that, developers from different technical fields also have new tools available. Game developers have feature-rich Unity SDK, Godot SDK, and Unreal Engine SDK. Fintech developers can quickly adopt Solana's speed through SolanaPay. Building on Solana is easier than ever before.

UI Framework

Scaffold and Wallet Adapter provide convenience for the development experience of UI frameworks. Currently, the most supported frameworks are React and Next.js, covering a large number of developers.

- Scaffold: A tool that allows developers to quickly set up template websites.

- Wallet Adapter: A tool that supports easy integration with Solana wallets.

Local Development Environment

Local development environment is a collection of tools that allows developers to build on their local machine, speeding up development and reducing build costs. To build a new application, developers need to start building on their local computer. An efficient local development environment can significantly reduce the resistance developers encounter when building on a new framework. The main local environment tool currently used by people is the Solana tool suite. The Solana tool suite allows developers to run test validators, send transactions, airdrop, deploy smart contracts, and run tests against the environment on their local machine. This tool allows developers to run applications from start to finish in a production environment. Compared to the mature Foundry toolchain for EVM, the Solana tool suite has the ability to send transactions via CLI and easily replicate mainnet accounts, although the experience is not as simple. Pulling accounts is more manual than Foundry because Solana's smart contracts are stateless, meaning users must collect or create states in many different places to run tests locally. Sending transactions is possible, but not as simple as extending to any smart contract. This is because the Solana protocol gives users the choice of serialization when interacting with smart contracts, resulting in many different ways of interaction without a direct standard. Both of these can be solved in the long run.

Balance with other ecosystem toolchains

One way to measure the usability of the Solana ecosystem toolchain is to compare it to popular tools outside of the EVM. In most cases, developers who are new to web3 and smart contract development will learn Solidity as their first language and the EVM programming paradigm. This first encounter with the EVM complicates the transition to the Solana ecosystem for developers, as it often requires them to forget what they know about the EVM in order to properly develop using the Solana protocol's account model. Among the 5,800 monthly active Solidity developers, only 7% have tried Solana development. Some tools already exist to help accelerate the adoption of the Solana blockchain and the transition of developers from the EVM. Solidity development is enabled through the following projects:

- Neon: EVM-compatible development environment.

- Hyperledger Solang: Solidity compiler on Solana.

除了兼容 EVM 的环境之外，许多开发者可能会使用本机的 Solana 开发实践。对于 EVM 生态系统中可用的大多数主要工具，都有一个 Solana 等效物：

Except for the environment that is compatible with EVM, many developers may use native Solana development practices. For most of the major tools available in the EVM ecosystem, there is a Solana equivalent.

Given the relative newness of the Solana blockchain compared to EVM, this demonstrates that the developer ecosystem is building all necessary tools to make the Solana development experience better. While not yet meeting all of Foundry's standards, the Solana ecosystem is in a favorable position to further improve and mature its toolchain.

Maintenance

Any developer who deploys applications to a production environment knows that being able to easily maintain the application will avoid a lot of trouble. How does the Solana protocol perform in maintaining applications? Understanding the difficulty of maintaining an application depends on several factors:

- Testing and Debugging: How easy is it to write tests to maintain functionality and debug potential issues?

- Security: How to maintain application security?

- Analysis: How to properly monitor the running of application programs in production environment?

Testing and Debugging

Testing and debugging are very important in the development lifecycle. Tools related to testing and debugging can save hours of software development time and help companies find problems faster, reducing risks in the build process. In 2023, the developer ecosystem built tools that made testing and debugging a simpler process.

- Debugger: In the past year, two methods have been created for using step-by-step debuggers, Bokken and ledger-tool debugger. With these tools, you can set breakpoints at every line of code in Solana's basic smart contracts and understand the account status at each line of code.

- Test: The mocha test of the Anchor framework is currently the most commonly used testing framework in Solana smart contracts. In the past six months, Solana Bankrun has been created to greatly increase the speed of testing and enhance testing capabilities. Solana-program-test also exists with similar functionality and speed.

- Code Coverage: The code coverage tool for smart contracts on Solana is still incomplete. Developers can use general Rust code coverage tools, but most of them cannot accurately measure coverage.

- Log Recording: In most cases, the basic Solana logger used in solana-program. This logger can be obtained through smart contract logs and transmitted through Geyser or sologger for analysis. SaaS tools like Ironforge can also help monitor application logs in production. In the past year, the basic logger has been improved through the Anchor framework, avoiding many early limitations.

- Event: The Anchor framework currently provides a very basic way of handling events for Solana chain applications. However, without involving some infrastructure, the framework will not provide you with an immediate event queue and cannot catch up with the latest state of the chain without additional infrastructure. There are some future proposals to improve events around Solana.

Security

For any company that wants to operate securely, having a secure application in production is crucial. Security in decentralized applications is even more critical. Any vulnerabilities in smart contracts can lead to significant financial losses if you're not careful. So how can today's developers keep their smart contracts secure?

- CI Scan: Developers can use basic Github actions to scan for small vulnerabilities in smart contracts. This scan can help them quickly discover vulnerabilities before any deployment.

- Fuzz testing: Conducting appropriate fuzz testing on commonly known vulnerabilities is a good way to maintain smart contract security. Fuzz testing frameworks like trdelnik provide a quick way to determine if a smart contract is susceptible to simple threats.

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