Ethereum’s Total Value Locked (TVL) is $28,000,000,000 USD and Ethereum’s market cap is $193,000,000,000 USD. Based on my estimations below, there are at most 269,000 monthly active Solidity developers.
Therefore, the Ethereum TVL per Solidity developer is more than $104,000, and the Ethereum market cap per Solidity developer is more than $717,000. So for all practical purposes, you can assume that the total value locked per Solidity developer is at least $821,000.*
*I used very conservative assumptions; the real numbers will be much higher (see below). Also, I’m aware that not all Ethereum developers use Solidity, but most (see below). At the time of writing, we’re amid a bear market in 2023, with the TVL of both Ethereum and its Solidity smart contracts down roughly 70%. As the number of developers doesn’t grow proportionally to the price in a bull market, this number can be seen as a historic “worst-case” estimation.
How Many Monthly Active Solidity Developers Are There?
My basic assumption is that a monthly active Solidity developer checks the Solidity docs at least once per month. Currently, the Solidity docs have 580,000 visits per month and 2.15 pages per visit, so our estimate is 269,000 active Solidity developers per month.
Reasons there are more Solidity developers: Some active Solidity developers may not check out the docs during development. However, I think this won’t change the number by more than a factor of 2-3x.
Reasons there are fewer Solidity developers: On the other hand, this may be a significant overestimation of the number of Solidity devs because the number of sessions may be much larger than the number of active users. Many Solidity developers will check out the docs multiple times per month!
So, the 269,000 Solidity developers per month number is likely to be a significant overestimation and can be seen as an upper bound. Consequently, the TVL per Solidity developer will be much larger than our $821,000 number, even considering that not all ETH dApp developers use Solidity (only most).
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