2023 Solana Developer Ecosystem Report

Written by: Solana Foundation

Compile: 0x711, BlockBeats

The Solana developer ecosystem continues to grow. In 2023, the developer ecosystem has made significant progress in tooling, developer experience, content quality, and diversity of available programming languages. Today, the Solana developer ecosystem has more than 2,500 monthly active open source library developers. Professional developers continue to join the ecosystem, and the developer environment is becoming increasingly mature.

Developer ecosystem

anyBlockchainThe health of the developer ecosystem is critical to sustaining the network. While measuring the health of an ecosystem is difficult and no single factor can tell the whole story, the following metrics are critical to assessment:

• Total monthly active open source developers: The number of monthly active open source developers building within the ecosystem.

• Developer retention rate: The ecosystem fosters the “stickiness” of continued development.

• Developer experience level: The developer's professional experience.

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

Total number of monthly active developers

One of the simplest ways to measure how a network is growing isBlockchainThe number of active developers on . At the Solana Foundation, we use an open source service to collect developer data and have publicly documented how we collect this data. Over the past year, we have approximately 2,500 – 3,000 developers on Solana who will continue to be active throughout 2023.

Developer monthly activity data in 2023

Maintaining a critical mass of developers is an important indicator of a healthy ecosystem because it demonstrates the ecosystem's ability to attract and retain new talent. It is important to note that this data only counts developers who contributed to public repositories and does not take into account developer activity that occurs 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 Solana BlockchainOpen source onCommunityGrowth, the Foundation's renewed support for public development will help drive future innovation in Solana applications.

Developer retention rate

衡量每月活跃开发者只是故事的一部分。大量实验区块链的开发者如果留存率低，可能不会转化为可持续发展的开发者Community。低留存率构成风险，可能导致开发者在对网络做出有意义贡献之前离开。为了进一步评估开发者Community的健康状况，关键是要结合每月活跃开发者一起衡量留存率。 就本报告而言，如果开发者在开始后的连续三个月中至少进行一次代码提交，则将其定义为已留存的开发者。

Developer monthly retention rate data in 2023

In 2023, the 3-month developer retention rate in the Solana ecosystem will increase from 31% to over 50%, allowing more developers who join to stay in the ecosystem. Improved retention rates may be due to several reasons:

• Developer introduction is improving.

• The Solana blockchain has become a clearer choice for developers.

• Opportunities in the ecosystem have increased.

Over the past year, the Solana developer onboarding process has been steadily improving, with the Solana Foundation releasing several new guides on how to get started. Through multiple developer training camps with varying focus and difficulty, 400-500 senior developers graduate every 6 months with the intention of building on Solana. Data from the latest Solana Hyperdrive Hackathon shows that approximately 50% of the top 150 committers and approximately 50% of the 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. While the opportunities available to developers within the ecosystem are difficult to measure, there is a steady increase in the number of jobs posted to jobs.solana.com, which aggregates positions in the Solana ecosystem. From 15 in January 2023 to 95 positions at launch. 41 positions will be added in December 2023 alone. While this is an imperfect metric, job opportunities are important to keeping new talent contributing and building the network.

Developer experience level

The skill level of developers building applications on the chain directly affects the overall success of the network. If a network has mostly more experienced developers building apps, the likelihood of that network's apps gaining new users is higher. At Solana, more than half of the developers entering the ecosystem have at least 3 years of experience, leading to higher-level contributions to applications built on the network. One way to measure this is by measuring the experience level of attendees at Solana's Hacker Houses, week-long events held around the world. These events serve as spaces for learning and networking, with talks and office hours specifically targeted at developers and founders. Of the 1,059 developers attending Solana Hacker House 2023, 52.5% said they had 3+ years of developer experience, more than any other group at our event.

Developer experience level data

Developer growth

Although the Solana ecosystem is relatively new (Solana mainnet beta went live in March 2020), its developer ecosystem has grown into the second-largest ecosystem by total monthly active developers. This growth is caused by many different factors, and it's hard to pinpoint what leads most developers to join. Since the launch of the mainnet beta, the Solana Foundation has launched or funded various initiatives with the core goal of growing the developer ecosystem. Some key initiatives include Solana Hackathons, Solana Hacker House, Breakpoint, educational bootcamps and sponsored university events. Ecosystem-led teams such as SuperteamDAO, mtnDao, Metcamp and Gen3 also contributed to this growth. We expect the Solana Hackathon to be an important indicator of the health of the developer ecosystem. Since 2020, the Solana Foundation has sponsored eight hackathons. Over the past three years, more than 3,000 projects have been launched, raising more than $600 million in funding for projects submitted to the hackathon. As each hackathon proceeds, the number of project submissions increases. The most recent hackathon, Solana Hyperdrive, received over 900 submissions.

Number of hackathon submissions

global growth

It’s important to note that while the ecosystem as a whole is growing, a lot of the growth is coming from newly added global regions. The global developer ecosystem's efforts come from a bottom-up philosophy of communities that grow outward. One example is SuperteamDao, an India-focused community of builders. SuperteamDao began expanding to other countries in early 2023 and now has branches in 8 countries. Other groups using similar concepts include Gen3 in Taiwan, MetacampDao in Singapore and mtnDao in the United States. While the Solana Foundation does not currently track granular regional growth on a daily basis, growth rates can be seen at a regional level through Solana Hackathons held every six months. In the Solana Foundation’s latest hackathon, “Solana Hyperdrive,” participants came from 151 countries. 65 countries submitted final works.

Historically, the United States has been the most represented country at Solana Hackathons, followed closely by India. The share of hackathon submissions outside the United States has increased significantly in recent years, rising from 76% in 2021 to 91% in Hyperdrive. Developer communities have been a priority in countries with deep engineering talent, such as India, Germany, China, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Vietnam. Countries to watch include Brazil and throughout Latin America, Japan, France, Nigeria and Israel.

As the most mature region in the Solana ecosystem, the United States still dominates the list of hackathon winners, but those numbers continue to change. Ultimately, the goal of any developer ecosystem should be an even distribution of high-quality projects across the globe.

Now built on Solana

Widespread blockchain adoption depends on robust infrastructure and the availability of developer tools to enable seamless onboarding and continued development. When choosing an ecosystem to build in, developers look at several key factors:

• Developer experience: How easy is it to learn and build applications?

• Maintenance: How much effort is required to maintain and monitor the application as it is being built? As the Solana ecosystem continues to evolve, each area is expected to mature and become more accessible to developers.

Developer experience

Developer experience is a critical part of any ecosystem - the resources and maturity of the tools available can have a decisive impact on the developer build process. Today, the Solana blockchain has an increasingly mature tool ecosystem and a wealth of learning resources for developers to get started. Going forward, publishing more resources on building projects from start to finish can help accelerate new developers, as well as tools to help debug and understand computing resource usage. The Solana protocol is known for its parallel processing capabilities, which can only be achieved by requiring developers to declare in advance which parts of the state they are working with. Therefore, developers need appropriate frameworks and tools to manage all the state more easily. Developers deciding whether to build on Solana ask the following questions:

• Documentation and Examples: How easy is it to reference the available documentation and resources?

• Educational programs and courses: What education is available to developers?

• SDKs and Frameworks: Are there commonly used SDKs and frameworks to speed up my development?

• Native development tools: How malleable are the native tools so that I can quickly prototype a new application?

• Full of tools: How does Solana compare to other ecosystems?

Documentation and examples

The current documentation on the Solana blockchain is largely conceptual and includes guides to help developers get started building in Solana. Over the past year, a large number of program examples have been created to help anyone build on-chain applications on Solana, which has helped launch the on-chain developer ecosystem. The Solana Cookbook has a comprehensive selection of client code examples, including hundreds of code snippets each in at least three different programming languages. For developers who want to learn more about the latest internals of the Solana protocol, there is currently a lack of up-to-date information. This is partly due to the rapid pace of Solana protocol updates. Solana improvements to documentation and protocol specifications will be developed over time, filling in missing gaps by being placed into the documentation prior to implementation. As Solana continues to mature and more research organizations like Umbra Research begin writing internal knowledge, the latest information should become more prevalent in documentation.

Educational programs and courses

As of this writing, there are a variety of complete educational programs and courses available to help developers get into the Solana ecosystem. This includes independent study courses and tutor-led, group-based programs. The varying structures of educational development programs help developers learn in their preferred way, maintain high levels of accountability and increase participants' chances of success. Self-study education programs and courses in the past 12 months include:

• Unpacking Solana Courses

• Freecodecamp

• EasyA – IdeaSoft

Additionally, some mentor-led programs are:

• Web3BuildersAllianace

• Encode Club

• Ackee Blockchain

• Narr8ative

• Calyptus

• DevsNest

• RiseIn

• Nas Academy

SDKs and frameworks

The Solana developer ecosystem has a solid SDK foundation that impacts the majority of developers. In terms of UI frameworks, there is a high concentration of React and Next.js tools on the Solana blockchain. For each language, we can evaluate the available tools in the following way:

• Solana SDK: SDK that interacts with RPC and creates transactions to interact with the blockchain.

• Programming framework: The ability to create Solana programs using a specific programming language.

• Developer impact: Measured by the proportion of developers using a programming language or UI framework.

New developers entering the ecosystem can now do it by just writing Typescript (never learning Rust or writing Solana intelligencecontract) is fully integrated into Solana's build. Not only that, but new tools are available to developers in different technical fields. Game developers have the full-featured Unity SDK, Godot SDK and Unreal Engine SDK. Fintech developers can quickly adopt Solana speed with SolanaPay. Building in Solana is easier than ever.

UI framework

Scaffold andwalletAdapters facilitate the developer experience for each UI framework. The most supported frameworks currently are React and Next.js, covering a large number of developers.

• Scaffold: A tool that allows developers to quickly use boilerplate website setups.

• walletAdapters: Tools that enable easy integration with the Solana wallet.

local development environment

A local development environment is a collection of tools that enable developers to build on their local machine to speed up development and reduce build overhead. To build a new application, developers need to start the build on their local computer. An efficient local development environment can significantly reduce the friction developers encounter when building on new frameworks. The main local environment tool people use today is the Solana tool suite. The Solana tool suite enables developers to run test validators, send transactions, airdrops, and deploy intelligence on their local machinecontract，并针对环境运行测试。此工具允许开发者从头到尾在生产环境中运行应用程序。 与 EVM 成熟的 Foundry 工具链相比，Solana 工具套件具有通过 CLI 发送交易和轻松复制主网账户的功能，尽管体验不是那么简单。拉取账户比 Foundry 更加手动，因为 Solana 的智能contract是无状态的，这意味着用户必须在许多不同的位置收集或创建状态才能在本地运行测试。发送交易是可能的，但不能像扩展到任何智能合约那样简单。这是因为 Solana 协议赋予用户与智能合约交互时选择序列化的选择权，导致了许多不同的交互方式，没有直接的标准。这两者从长远来看都是可以解决的。

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 EVM. In most cases, first contact web3 and smart contract developers will learn Solidity as a first language, as well as the EVM programming paradigm. This first exposure to EVM complicates developers who later move to the Solana ecosystem, as it often requires developers to unlearn everything they know about EVM in order to develop properly using the Solana protocol's account model. Among the 5800 Solidity monthly active developers, only 7% have tried Solana development. Tools already exist to help accelerate adoption of Solana ZoneXiaobai NavigationThe iteration speed of blockchain and developers’ transformation from EVM. Solidity development is enabled through the following projects:

• Neon: EVM-compatible development environment

• Hyperledger Solang: Solidity compiler on Solana

In addition to EVM-compatible environments, 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 nascent nature of the Solana blockchain relative to the EVM, this is proof that the developer ecosystem is building all the necessary tools to make the Solana developer experience better. While not yet meeting all of Foundry's standards, the Solana ecosystem is in a good position to further improve and mature its toolchain.

maintain

Any developer who has deployed an application into production knows that being able to easily maintain the application will save a lot of headaches. How well does the Solana protocol perform in maintaining applications? Understanding how easy an application is to maintain depends on a few factors:

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

• SafetySex: How to Keep an AppSafety?

• Analysis: How to properly monitor application operations in a production environment?

Testing and Debugging

Testing and debugging are important in the development life cycle. Tools related to testing and debugging can save hours of software development time, help companies find problems faster, and reduce risks in building. In 2023, the developer ecosystem built tools to make testing and debugging an easier process.

• Debuggers: Over the past year, two methods of using step debuggers have been created, the Bokken and ledger-tool debuggers. Using these tools, you can set breakpoints on every line of code in Solana's base smart contract and understand the status of your account at each line of code.

• Testing: The mocha test of the Anchor framework is currently the most commonly used testing framework in Solana smart contracts. Over the past six months, Solana Bankrun was created to make testing significantly faster and more powerful. Solana-program-test also exists, with similar functionality and speed.

• Code Coverage: Code coverage tools for smart contracts on Solana are still incomplete. Developers can use general Rust code coverage tools, but most cannot accurately measure coverage.

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

• Events: The Anchor framework currently provides a very basic event handling method for applications on the Solana chain. However, without some infrastructure involved, the framework does not provide you with an instant queue of events to catch up on the latest state of the chain without additional infrastructure. There are some future proposals surrounding improving events on Solana.

Safetysex

to anyone who wantsSafety运营的公司来说，在生产中拥有一个安全的应用程序至关重要。在去中心化应用程序中的安全性甚至更加关键。智能合约中的任何漏洞，如果您不小心的话，都可能导致大量资金损失。那么今天的开发者如何保持他们的智能合约安全呢？

• CI Scan: Developers can use basic Github Action Scan to scan for small vulnerabilities in smart contracts. This scanning helps them quickly discover vulnerabilities before any deployment.

• Auditing: Any serious smart contract developer will be audited by a third-party company within the ecosystem. In the few short years that Solana has been around, several companies have emerged that focus on auditing.

• Fuzz testing: Proper fuzz testing for common known vulnerabilities is a great way to keep your smart contracts secure. Fuzz testing frameworks like trdelnik provide a quick way to understand whether a smart contract is vulnerable to simple threats.

• Real-time scanning: When running in production, it’s best to proactively guard against any potential threats by scanning transactions for anomalies in real-time. Riverguard provides high-level scanning on mainnet, looking through a range of transaction patterns to understand whether on-chain applications are vulnerable to attacks.

The Solana developer ecosystem has a considerable number of tools to keep on-chain applications running securely in production. But as developer skill levels increase, so do more sophisticated attacks – and as we continue to improve our applications, furthering security education and tools is critical to success.

analyze

Developers seek analysis on their application's performance as well as the performance of competitors' applications. Currently, the analytics platform supports Solana through raw and parsed transactions. Due to insufficient availability and depth of data in IDL, the analytics platform was slowed down and unable to provide rich account analytics. Once the IDL framework provided by Anchor is improved and more widely available, smart contract analysis will also improve.

future opportunities

The current Solana developer ecosystem is only four years old. During this time, rich content and tools to help developers build have fostered the maturing ecosystem that exists today. There are still many opportunities in the ecosystem. In the future, the developer ecosystem must further improve the local development environment to match the best-in-class tools provided by Foundry; add a more powerful event system; and provide more end-to-end product examples to accelerate the development of new applications. The Solana Foundation has been working hard to help the growth of the Solana developer ecosystem, encourage new developers to contribute to the developer experience, and support the maturation of the tools. If you have an idea to improve the Solana developer ecosystem and need financial support, please feel free to apply for funding. We welcome any feedback about the developer ecosystem and how to improve the experience.

The article comes from the Internet:2023 Solana Developer Ecosystem Report

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