ETHGlobal Developer Survey Report — 2020

20 min readDec 31, 2020

This report was authored with input from the ETHGlobal team. Thank you as well to the Ethereum community members that helped to structure the initial survey.

Overview
Key Results
Survey Analysis
a. Demography
b. Work
c. Technology and Skills
d. Building on Ethereum
e. Most Popular Tech

1. Overview

In February of this year, we put out the call for our first ever Ethereum Developer Survey. While there have been many smaller case studies, we believe this is the most comprehensive survey of the Ethereum developer community to date.

We were fortunate to have 723 developers respond — a huge thanks to everyone who participated by sharing their time and experiences!

We modelled the survey on the long-running Stack Overflow developer surveys. While our survey is more modest in its goals (and the number of respondents we were able to reach), we intentionally replicated some of the Stack Overflow questions to try and provide a point of comparison between the Ethereum developer community and the broader global developer community.

Methodology
These survey responses were collected in February & March 2020. Some of the survey questions — particularly around remote work, travel, and other issues — reflect a pre-COVID reality rather than the current state of the Ethereum developer community.

We advertised the survey via email, in developer chats, on reddit, and on Twitter. As an incentive, we offered several raffled prizes to respondents: 10 prizes of 100 DAI, 2 flights to Devcon 2021, or 2 tickets to Devcon 2021.

2. Key Results

Ethereum developers are younger and more diverse than the general developer community
Ethereum developers place higher value on the impact of their work, compared to the general developer community
Barriers to entry include poor documentation and developers believing they did not know enough to contribute to the space.
67% of respondents were interested/involved in Bitcoin before they got involved in Ethereum
86% of respondents hold ETH
59% of respondents put their own funds in DeFi products or protocols

3. Survey analysis

A. Developer Profiles

Geography
Our survey respondents are geographically diverse, with the majority residing in the United States (25.1%) followed by Canada (7.3%), India (6.9%), the U.K. (6.4%), and Germany (3.6%).

This largely aligns with the results from Stack Overflow 2020 (Source), where the top 5 were the United States, India, the UK, Germany and Canada.

Gender
When comparing survey results with those of the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer survey report (Source), we saw that the Ethereum developer community has a slightly lower percentage of male-identifying respondents (88.4% vs 91.5%).

Race & Ethnicity
The survey indicates people of colour continue to be underrepresented in developer communities. Important initiatives like Black Girls Code are working to increase diversity and representation.

The majority of respondents identified as being of White or European descent, with the next largest ethnicities represented being South Asian, East Asian, and Hispanic or Latino/Latina.

When compared to Stack Overflow, where 68.3% identified as White or European (Source), our respondents reflected a more diverse developer community (49.9% identifying as White or European).

Age
Our survey respondents are slightly younger than the broader dev community. Almost half (46.2%) were in their twenties, followed by 37.9% of respondents identifying as being in their thirties. Together, 84% of respondents were between the ages of 20–39. 78% fell into this bracket for Stack Overflow respondents (Source).

Experience
There is a wide range of experience among developers who responded to this survey, ranging from those who are just getting started (learned to code in the past 5 years) to veterans (learned 20+ years ago). The majority of respondents learned to code in the past decade.

Similarly, the majority of respondents said that they were able to use code to generate income at some point in their 20’s. Interestingly, a large percentage of respondents indicated that they generated income from coding while a teenager.

Education
While the majority of respondents do not identify as being a student, more than 21% reported to being enrolled in some form of school, whether part or full time.

About 40% of the respondents have either an Associate or Bachelors degree, vs 49.4% for Stack Overflow respondents (Source).

B. Work

Employment Status
The majority of respondents stated they are currently employed full-time, while nearly 25% stated that they’re working freelance or as an independent contractor. Only 10% of respondents stated that they’re currently looking for work.

Industry
Over 57% of Ethereum developers work full-time in the cryptocurrency / blockchain industry.

Entering the Crypto Workforce
Of those respondents who work full-time, 38.2% of respondents said they entered the cryptocurrency space via a part-time job. This may indicate that the developers could first be intrigued by a hackathon/passion project or a well-paying side-gig prior to deciding to work in the industry full-time.

Job Priorities
Ethereum developers are driven by impact. When asked what values matter most when considering two job offers, respondents said “How widely used or impactful my work output would be” was most important to them, followed by “Remote work options,” “Opportunities for professional development,” and “Flexible schedules.”

Compared to Stack Overflow respondents, where the top response was “Languages, frameworks, and other technologies I’d be working with,” (which only 5% of our respondents said was the most important factor) followed by “Office environment or company culture,” “Flex time or a flexible schedule,” and “Opportunities for professional development” (Source).

Note: Due to the timing of the survey and the realities of work during the Covid pandemic, certain options such as “remote work” and “office environment or company culture” may have figured higher in survey responses than they would if asked today.

Office Environment
When asked about office culture and where respondents do their work, 65% of respondents stated their company had an office, though only half of those respondents worked there most of the time. As with some other questions on the survey that are likely to be more heavily impacted by the realities of work during Covid, future surveys may show changing attitudes with regards to remote work and office culture.

Where Developers do their Work
Half of respondents identified doing most of their work at home. For the remainder, one third responded to doing most of their work at the office, and only 10% responded that they do most of their work in a coworking space or cafe.

Remote-First
An incredible 55.9% of Ethereum devs work remotely at least half of the time (again, pre-COVID data), compared to only 18.2% for the Stack Overflow 2019 survey (Source).

Remote Work & Travel
When asked whether they choose to work remotely and travel at the same time, 53.4% of respondents answered ‘Yes’.

Working Overtime
A majority of respondents (31.3%) stated they work a typical work week, (between 40–44 hours), compared to 51.7% of Stack Overflow developers (Source). A third of our respondents (34%) stated they typically work longer hours, between 45 and up to 50+ hours a week. Ethereum devs working 50+ hours per week is significantly higher than Stack Overflow Devs, at 19.9% vs 12.8%.

Moonlighting
A large majority of respondents (82%) reported that they work on software projects outside of working hours.

Working on Blockchain Projects Outside of Work
A large majority (68.3%) of respondents spend that time working on blockchain projects outside of work.

Contributing to Open Source
Ethereum developers are more likely to contribute to OSS projects — 30% of respondents stated that they contribute to open-source software once a month compared to just 12.4% of 2019 Stack Overflow respondents (Source).

C. Technology & Skills

Developer Roles
A majority of respondents (37.6%) stated that “Developer, full-stack” best described them, followed by “Developer, Back-end” at 12.9% and “Student” at 7.3%. Together, back-end and full-stack developers form 50% of the survey respondents.

Compared to the most recent Stack Overflow survey, the top four were “Back-end,” “Full-Stack,” “Front-end,” and “Desktop / enterprise applications” (Source). The high percentage of students in the Ethereum developer community suggests that many people are starting off their careers with exposure to blockchain (or while they’re still in school).

Building & New Ideas
When asked what field of Ethereum-related work their talents are best suited for, the majority of respondents stated “Building products” (39.6%) followed by “prototyping new ideas” (17.7%).

Programming Languages
When asked what programming language developers use most often (outside of Ethereum/blockchain development), the majority of respondents stated javascript is the programming language they use most often (37.1%), with python being the next most popular programming language at 21.4%.

Frameworks
The top four web frameworks used by Ethereum developers include React.js (49.8%), Express (9.0%), Vue.js (7.8%), and Angular (6.4%). For Stack Overflow respondents, the top four frameworks included jQuery, React.js, Angular, and ASP.NET (Source).

Where Ethereum Developers hear about trends
For those within the Ethereum developer ecosystem, it will likely come as no surprise that Twitter is the most common place for developers to hear about new trends.

A sizable majority of respondents said they find out about new tech on Twitter (34.7%), followed by Reddit (13.7%), from friends (9.2%), or while at conferences (5.5%).

Because this survey data was collected at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, it’s reasonable to assume that the options of “Conferences” and “Meetups” figured higher then than it would if the same respondents were asked today.

Where Developers go for general tech news
Similarly, over 30% of Ethereum devs get their tech news on Twitter, followed by Reddit (20%), Hacker News (16.6%), and Medium (7.7%).

Where Devs Find info on Projects
We asked survey takers how they’d go about finding out if someone has already built something they were thinking of creating, and the majority of respondents would start with a Google search, followed by a GitHub search and asking on Twitter.

Using Github to validate a project
When asked where developers go to publish or get validation for a side project, a large majority of developers chose Github (34.1%), followed by Twitter (14.9%). How validated side projects make their way from Github to Twitter (where most developers find out about new tech trends) is an interesting question that we will hopefully explore in future surveys.

Reasons for dropping a side project
When asked what convinced developers to abandon their last side project for their current side project, the majority of respondents cited “lack of time” (34.7%). The next most cited reason was “lack of funding” at 17.3% and “no traction/couldn’t find users” at 14.9%.

Never Stop Learning
Over 20% of Ethereum devs spend more than 8 hours per week diving into new technologies, and almost 80% (79.7%) spend at least 1 hour a week learning about new tech.

How Developers Learn
When asked what type of medium (written, video and interactive tutorials) helps them learn best, respondents were fairly split. When comparing passive learning (written or video content) and live tutorials, 72.7% chose passive learning over interactive.

Pro (Crypto) Zombies
When asked what tutorial developers preferred, Crypto Zombies appeared to be a clear favourite and was cited by 28.7% of respondents, followed by Udemy at 19.9%.

D. Building on Ethereum

In this section, we will explore developers’ past and present relationship with Ethereum.

The Rabbit Hole
When asked how respondents first learned about Ethereum, a majority of respondents said “A friend told me” (34.7%) followed by “in the news” (13.4%).

Adoption
When we asked respondents when they first learned about Ethereum, a clear pattern emerged. 13% of our respondents learned about Ethereum in 2014, and that number increased each year up to 2017. But since 2018 far fewer respondents learned about Ethereum for the first time. In total, a majority of respondents learned about Ethereum more than 3 years ago.

This correlates with the broad outlines of the crypto market, which rallied in 2017 before crashing in early 2018. But it might also reflect the fact that it can take years before a new developer can become active contributors to the ecosystem. Developers who learned about Ethereum in 2019 may not yet be integrated enough to find this survey or motivated to fill it out

What explains this recent drop? It could be that the survey’s data set did not reach enough newcomers, or that the incentives were not attractive to newcomers. With future surveys we’ll be able to explore this question at greater depth.

Prior Interest in Bitcoin
Bitcoin is still a significant onramp for getting people eventually interested in Ethereum. Over two thirds of respondents said that they were involved or interested in Bitcoin prior to Ethereum.

Importance of Decentralization
The ethos of decentralization is still very much top-of-mind for Ethereum Developers. 93.9% of respondents said the ethos of decentralization was either “somewhat important” or “the most important thing.”

Writing First Ethereum Code
When asked when respondents first built on Ethereum, the majority stated that they first began building in the past 2–3 years (32.5%), and only 9.8% of respondents first built on Ethereum 4 or more years ago.

Another way to look at it is to compare the year of discovering Ethereum with when developers started building. There is a clear indicator that 2017 drew a lot of interest, but as the graph below shows, there can be some time before devs actually start building. It will be interesting to track whether lag time increases or decreases in the future.

In It for the Tech
When asked what aspects of Ethereum made you excited to get more involved, the most cited answer “the technology is interesting”, followed by its positive impact, the possibilities of DeFi, and the community.

Challenges for Beginners
While the majority of respondents stated “No” when asked if there were any aspects of Ethereum that turned them off at first, “Too much jargon” was the next most often cited response. The remainder of respondents were roughly split between “Thought it was only for ICOs”, “Too risky to work in the space”, “I believed it was a bubble” and “I thought it could never work.”

Meetups & Hackathons
Meetups have played a huge role in the development of the Ethereum community and will likely continue to do so when gatherings are permitted in future. The majority of respondents (31.4%) cited “a local Meetup” as the first Ethereum event they went to, the next highest cited response being “a hackathon”(24.3%).

Interestingly, 18.2% of survey respondents have never been to an Ethereum event. Whether this is due to limitations (travel costs) or just not being interested in attending events, a large portion of the community has only interacted with Ethereum and the Ethereum community online.

Best On-ramp to Ethereum
We asked survey takers what they thought was the best way for a developer to get involved in Ethereum and the two most cited answers were “attend a Hackathon” and “build something.”

Number of Blockchain Events Attended in 2019
Of those who have attended an Ethereum event, the majority of respondents stated they attended between 1–3 blockchain related events in 2019, with 35.8% attending 4–10 or more.

Barriers to Entry
When asked why they didn’t get involved sooner, 43.7% of respondents stated they didn’t think they “knew enough to contribute.” Whether this is due to the deeply technical nature of problems in the space, or related to the lack of good documentation or on-boarding, a large portion of the community may feel like they’re blocked from contributing. Less than 5% of respondents cited FUD (“I thought ETH would go to 0 and fail”) as a blocker.

Learning Resources
An overwhelming majority of respondents remembered reading about Ethereum on a blog or Medium post (25.2%), the next cited resource being Youtube at 8.3%.

First Ethereum Project
When asked what their first lines of code for an Ethereum project was for, the most cited answer was “a hobby project alone” (23.9%), followed by “training or educational course” (22.8%). 15.6% of respondents wrote their first line of code for an Ethereum project at their job or company which indicates broader corporate adoption may be driving growth in the Ethereum community.

Blind Spots
When asked what their biggest blind spots are as Ethereum developers, the most cited answers from respondents were “UI”, “ETH2” followed closely by “Security.”

Having Doubts
When we asked survey takers whether they’ve considered stopping their involvement in Ethereum, almost 24% said “yes”, compared to 76.3% of respondents who said they haven’t.

Turn-offs
When we asked those survey takers who had considered stopping their involvement in Ethereum why, respondents were split. The largest percentage of respondents stated they didn’t have enough time, while the next most often cited responses were “community issues” (15.2%) and “unclear impact” (14.5%). How and in what ways community issues would turn off Ethereum enthusiasts is an important question deserving of further research if the community is to continue to grow.

Rage Quitting an App
We asked survey participants if they’d ever rage quit an app and if so, why, and the most cited reasons were “UX/UI Issues” followed by the app not functioning. The next two most cited reasons were “congestion” and “dev issues/tooling.”

E. Most Popular Tech

Favourite Library
When asked which Ethereum library they use most often a large majority of respondents (58.4%) chose Web3.js, followed by ethers.js at 20.6%. (More recent data indicates that it may be a more even split between both libraries.) Interestingly, 21% of survey respondents responded that they don’t use either, which may be related to the high % of respondents who use Python (i.e. not building javascript applications). It’s also possible developers could be using libraries implementing web3.js or ethers.js under the hood, but they are abstracted away.

Most Used Tools
We asked survey takers which tools they’ve used, Metamask, web3.js, truffle and etherscan were the most cited. (Select all that apply)

Most Used Ethereum Language
When asked which Ethereum languages our survey takers have used, Solidity was the clear favourite with almost all respondents (97.1%) saying they’ve used the language before. 2.9% of respondents said they’ve only used Vyper.

What Devs Use Ethereum For
We asked what they use Ethereum for in their daily lives, the majority of respondents said they use it for “Building/Learning” followed closely by “DeFi”.

Most Used Ethereum Apps
Close to 50% of respondents said they use DAI daily, followed by ENS, Compound, Uniswap & Gitcoin.

Holding ETH
More than 86% of devs own ETH, vs. 13.3% who do not or would “rather not say.”

Using DeFi with Personal Funds
Another striking majority of respondents (59.9%) use DeFi products or protocols with their personal funds.

If you could show one great Ethereum Demo to the World…
We asked survey takers what Ethereum demo or experience they would show the world and the majority of respondents chose Argent (9.1%) followed by Maker (8.4%) and Pooltogether (6.9%).

Going Mainstream
When asked what they thought will cause the next 10x growth of Ethereum developers most respondents said “a Mainstream App”, followed by “better dev tooling” and “DeFi”.

Who within the Ethereum ecosystem has helped you the most? How?

Responses here cited the encouragement, inspiration or in some cases, financial support these people offered. Kudos to these individuals for helping to grow the community!

Vitalik, Gitcoin, ETHGlobal, Kevin Owocki, Andreas Antonopoulos, Joe Lubin, Gregory McCubbin, Antonio Sabado, Austin Griffith, Liam Horne, Evan van Ness, Piper Merriam, Ricmoo, Peter Pan, Bokky Poobah, ETHHub, Simona Pop & Albert Ni

How would you convince a developer friend that Ethereum is worth checking out?

There were a few themes that emerged we noticed in responses — they have been organized below in a numbered list.

Relate it to something they are interested in personally

“if you want to keep democracy healthy, you’d be interested in this tech!”
“Do you ever dream about creating your own economic policy but hate the idea of getting into politics? Ethereum lets you craft economic systems from thin air. You can bend economic laws to your will like a powerful sorcerer. Incentives are your spells and scarcity is your mana.”
“Find some aspect of society they’re unsatisfied with and pitch a way that decentralization might help”

2. Describe or demonstrate a novel usecase

“Hey, can you imagine taking a loan of a couple hundred thousand dollars without credit scoring?”
“Demo a net-neutral flash loan on mainnet and watch as they have their light bulb moment.”
“By giving him some tokens for something he finds interesting”
“Having the ability to build applications that can’t be shut down is super powerful”

3. Point to network effects, adoption, composability

“Biggest developer base, most value on-chain (ERC20s), plenty of other Ethereum-based projects and tools.”
“point to the amount of $ being invested in the space”
“by telling them the amount of people involved in the space globally, & how quick that number is growing”
“Explain how we could build our own DeFi money legos that incorporate any/all of the existing projects”
“Look at the ETHGlobal Hackathon winner projects…”
“All developers are there, join the party”

4. Explain via analogy

“it’s like a server/db that’s everywhere and nowhere”
“It’s like Bitcoin but a fun little sandbox to program financial instruments”

5. Talk about the opportunities in the space

“You can get paid to work on Open Source!”
“tons of career, academic opportunities.”
“open source work now gets paid!!!”

If you had 3 months everything-paid-for but you had to build something interesting related to Ethereum, what would it be?

“A dual token NFT to NFT swap game see Straw Millionare/One Red Paperclip”
“A one click Ethereum PoS validator setup tool”
“A platform with multipurpose DAOs templates to start different organizations or a mega-tutorial with a lot of different paths and levels, for beginners to experts, for developers or investors, covering languages, tools, uses cases, etc.”
“A royalty sharing community (e.g. Bootlegger)”
“A self-hosted/locally ran fast-sync compatible block explorer.”
“Active sideproject: A generic DAO management/voting/discussion/calendar platform to manage your web3 self”
“An alternative to Web3/Ethers which exposes a GraphQL API, runs entirely on client side. Should also feature some caching.”
“DAO Observation thing = social network on top of DAOs.”
“Fork all the existing Defi “protocols”, make them into real protocols, pieces of free infrastructure.”
“Smart Contract Wallets with built-in inheritance mechanisms that used Sablier type streaming.”

Have you ever had a goose-bumps moment with Ethereum? Like that moment the lightbulb goes off and your mind races with implications and possibilities. What was it?!

“Creating my first Aragon DAO”
“I think once I started seeing the implication of contracts owning ETH and being able to act deterministically with it, realizing that we can replace entire companies with this model.”
“July 2017, first time I received my paycheck in Sai. I thought the world opened up to me. I still think this.”
“Just learning about DAOs that we can structure companies to be organized and governed by the community (bottom-up)”
“Just me doing a basic trust fund account smart contract and deploying it. A true defi moment for me.”
“reading vitalik’s schelling coin blog post from ages ago”
“Realising that what I build will be able to last thousands of years if it is useful and well designed.”
“realizing I could code smart contracts to handle millions of $, while sitting in my college dorm”
“Sablier salary streaming is pretty mindblowing!”
“So many things. MakerDAO, powering stability through greed.”
“Flashloans, and the amazingness that such a thing is even possible”
“Optimistic Rollups, were a real “holy shit that’s amazing” moment. We can totally do it the expensive way if you are sketchy, but otherwise lets both agree to be cheap!!”
“So many. Reading about solidity and seeing examples of decentralized programmable money really go me excited. The first time you send 100 dollars from the command line is pretty exciting. I think watching Jordan Leigh’s YouTube series on building Dapps was just packed full of moments.”
“The first week after I discovered Ethereum were magical. Everything was new”
“The latest lightbulb moment was when I discovered flash loans existed.”
“The moment I heard Vitalik said “Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.”
“When I finally got a system working that integrated multiple other protocols and systems. Specifically, I wrote a contract that controlled an ENS top level domain where others could register subdomains in a single call. That was pretty cool — once it worked.”
“When I realised almost everything on the internet will one day be decentralised, fair (no rent seeking) and collectively owned and run by DAOs”
“when I realized how impactful a worldwide ledger could be. One place where everyone can transact. Dang.”
“When my team won at ethberlin, one of the best memories”
“Yes, when attending any ETHGlobal hackathon” ❤️

The ETHGlobal team would again like to thank all the Ethereum developers that took time to share their experiences with us. We hope the data gathered here is helpful for other people and orgs looking to grow the ecosystem.

We’re all excited for another amazing year of building and growth in 2021.

Join us at MarketMake, a DeFi hackathon starting Jan 15 → Apply Now

Happy New Year! 🎉