Overview
The Electric Capital Developer Report is a free dashboard that shows how many people write open-source code for Cardano, month by month. It helps researchers, builders, and curious holders see whether the developer community is growing or shrinking, with charts that reach back to January 20151. The counts come from public code projects on GitHub, a website where developers store and share code2.
The Cardano page is one of many ecosystem pages on the Developer Report, a site run by Electric Capital, an investment firm that backs technology builders. Electric Capital started the project in 2018 and opened the live dashboard to the public in 20222. Its numbers come from Open Dev Data, Electric Capital's public dataset of crypto code projects and the developers who work on them3.
Key Features
- A monthly head count of Cardano developers. The main chart tracks monthly active developers and splits them into developers who work only on Cardano code and developers whose work also touches projects that support other chains, such as wallets and bridges1,2.
- How "active" is defined. A developer counts as active when they wrote code in a rolling 28-day window, and only the original author of the code gets credit, not the person who merged it into the project2.
- See who is committed and who is passing through. Separate charts sort Cardano developers into full-time, part-time, and one-time contributors, and by experience into newcomers, emerging, and established developers1.
- Growth at a glance. A summary table compares the developer count with one, two, and three years earlier, with rows for the total, full-time, and established developer counts1.
- Counts that filter out padding. The Electric Capital Developer Report removes copied and forked code (whole projects copied to start a new one), screens out automated bot accounts, and merges people who use several accounts to avoid counting the same person twice2.
What to Expect
Visitors land on a page with four headline numbers: full-time developers, monthly active developers, total code projects (called repositories), and total commits, meaning saved changes to code1. Below them sit three interactive charts and the growth table. A sign-up form lets you receive updates when Electric Capital adds or updates data1.
Cardano teams who think their work is missing can check and fix that. The page's "Add data" link leads to the Open Dev Data taxonomy, a public list on GitHub that maps code projects to the ecosystems they belong to1,4. Anyone can propose an addition through a pull request (a formal request to change shared files), and Electric Capital's team reviews each one before it counts toward the totals2. The taxonomy and its tools are open source under MIT and Creative Commons licenses4.
Researchers get more than the charts. The dashboard data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so it can be reused with credit and a link back2, and Open Dev Data offers the full dataset as downloadable files3. The Analysis section keeps the annual Developer Reports Electric Capital published from 2018 to 2024 as historical reference5. The Cardano Foundation has cited the Developer Report's figures alongside its own developer survey results6.
The counts cover only public, open-source code, so developers on private projects and in roles that produce little unique code, such as testing or release engineering, are undercounted2.
