Ethereum Developer Tool Surpasses 3.5 Million Downloads

A smart contracts development tool used by ethereum coders has reached more than 3.5 million total downloads, most of it in the past two years.

Truffle, which is as easy for coders to get their hands on as npm install, is currently running at circa 120,000 downloads a month.

They say this has “built-in smart contract compilation, linking, deployment and binary management [and] automated contract testing with Mocha and Chai,” among many other things.

It is complemented by Ganache, which is literally your own blockchain running on your own computer like Localhost.

Localhosting your own blockchain sounds so cool, we’re tempted to try it ourself. So these downloads are not necessarily all pro coders.

In addition, it is 3.5 million devices at best, rather than individuals, and even then you might install the same package twice or if very unlucky maybe even ten times on the same device.

But it is still some sort of anchor to get to some estimate of how many ethereum coders there might be.

By slashing it 10x, we get a very conservative estimate (in our view) of 350,000 ethereum coders.

Conservative because it is probable most corporate blockchain projects have 10 people or more that know or are learning Solidity.

Then you have the circa 3,000 dapps running on the ethereum public network, most of them needing experienced coders.

In addition, the biggest booster to Solidity skills is now none other than flashloans, the coolest invention since bitcoin itself.

You need Solidity skills for that as it requires specific parameters and it can be a somewhat complex coding operation as shown recently by someone borrowing $30 million for practically free.

Then there are the bots, especially in defi, with their coders needing to know Solidity as the bot will have to follow or exploit the rules of the smart contract which often is written in Solidity but also sometime in Vyper.

So there are many reasons why plenty would want to play with their own local blockchain and smart contracts with it all fairly easy to learn if you have the time and average intelligence.

Meaning ConsenSys’ aim to get to one million ethereum developers may not be that far away, not least because there are now raw incentives in defi to grab opportunities that are not just low hanging fruits, but on the ground ripe for picking.

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