I just read the a16z Crypto report 2024, and what surprised me most was that Polkadot wasn’t mentioned at all—neither in the builder energy graph nor on any other page of the report.
This raises questions about the credibility of the report, but it also makes me reflect on what we can do to increase our visibility in the market. It’s clear we need to work on driving adoption, but it’s striking that networks with smaller user bases were mentioned more frequently than Polkadot.
While Polkadot’s technology is undeniably robust, we also have to acknowledge that it may not be the most developer-friendly environment. Could this be a barrier that prevents greater visibility and adoption? It raises the question: is the complexity of the technology outweighing its benefits in the eyes of developers and builders?
Perhaps we should focus more on improving developer experience and creating clearer, easier paths to adoption. A streamlined onboarding process and better tooling could help us not only attract more builders but also ensure they stick around long enough to make an impact. After all, the best technology won’t gain traction if it’s too difficult to use. This challenge should spark discussions within the community about how to make Polkadot more accessible while maintaining its technical strengths.
The builder interest presented in the report contrasts with the number of developers per ecosystem shown in other sources. Polkadot, for example, has consistently performed well in terms of developer count.
It would be interesting to see how this contradiction can be resolved.
However, I believe that reports like this, whether from Messari or other sources, are nothing but paid advertisement.
All these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.
Even when there’s a clear methodology for the report, like in the case of Electric Capital’s developer report, playing by the rules of that methodology is another thing.
Base, now ranked at 2nd place by the full-time developers metric, has these listed as its sub-ecosystems - Chainlink, Smart Contract Kit, Brave, The Graph, Ledger, DefiLlama, Covalent, Subquery, Fireblocks, etc etc.
These tools (generic wallets, oracles, browsers, analytics platforms and infra providers) are common infrastructure, not Base ecosystem’s own developments. These multi-chain web3 projects should be either in general.toml only, not attributed to specific ecosystems interacting with them, or attributed to all associated.
The EC annual developer report is upcoming (deadline for submisions Nov 1st), that has quite a reach and impact.
I’m not surprised by a16z’s omission of Polkadot, or rebranding of the metric to “builder energy” -
In their 2022 State of Crypto, Polkadot (fastest growing developer ecosystem at the time) was simply deleted from the chart sourced from Electric Capital developer report, citing “Some projects were omitted due to unclear, unavailable, or imprecise data”.
