The Eth2 Client Development Report 2021, published today by Chainstack, is an in-depth analysis that focuses on tracking the development and developer engagement data of the Eth2 clients, all of which host their code on GitHub. The main source of developer data used for the report is retrieved from the moment the Eth2 client code went online on GitHub until the end of 2020.
Researched over the span of several months, the Eth2 Client Development Report 2021 reveals the impressive client diversity of Eth2 and the factors contributing to the success of an open-source project — an especially relevant point for the largest decentralized network with smart contract functionality.
Key findings include:
1. Collectively, 20 years of work by 10 independent Eth2 client teams have contributed to the launch of the mainnet.
2. The Ethereum Foundation has granted the publicly disclosed amount in excess of $2,000,000 to the development of Eth2 clients.
3. Over 5,000 developers have engaged with and contributed to the five client projects that are a part of the Eth2 mainnet today.
4. The effort put in by all the teams has made Eth2 a truly multiclient network with five clients supporting the mainnet right on launch.
5. Enterprise has the biggest number of developers. In the number of unique developers that actually pushed the code that makes the clients what they are, Teku — touted as the enterprise client — takes the first place.
Findings on Eth2 clients:
1. Written in Go, Prysm, with almost twice as much developer activity as the rest of the clients, is shaping up to be the major Eth2 client, similar to Go Ethereum in Eth1.
2. The programming language choice follows the Eth1 mainnet client popularity, where the number one client is Geth written in Go and number two is OpenEthereum (formerly Parity) written in Rust.
3. Unlike all other companies that develop the clients in the list, Prysmatic Labs is a pure-play Ethereum company.
4. Prysm is the leading client project whose average push activity per developer grew almost seven times from 2018 to 2019 and remained consistent since then.
5. The Nimbus client, created to run on resource-restricted devices, receives enough developer interest to get to number three in popularity.
“The launch of Eth2 mainnet was a key milestone for the blockchain industry, and for DeFi in particular. Beyond all the hype and passion, we wanted to look under the hood of this massive community effort in such a way that would be objective, well-researched and insightful. As a company, we continue to put the blockchain community first, and publishing this original report is an effort to empower businesses and IT innovators to better understand our fast-shifting industry.”
– Laurent Dedenis, CEO at Chainstack
The report can be accessed and downloaded here.