According to a new Q3 2022 report published on October 13 by Web3 development platform Alchemy, “Web3 companies and protocols have never been so active” despite the crypto winter.
The report highlights that there is a large and growing interest in developing applications on Ethereum. “2022 has been the biggest year yet,” with developers deploying 117,922 verified smart contracts on Ethereum, accounting for more than one-third of all smart contracts ever deployed and verified.
In 2022, nearly 118,000 smart contracts were deployed and verified on the blockchain, accounting for 36% of all smart contracts ever deployed and verified on the blockchain.
Smart contract deployments increased 143% from the third quarter of 2021 to over 48,500 in the third quarter of 2022.
Every month, more than 50 decentralised applications are deployed. According to the data, there are currently 12,495 dApps across all chains, up from around 1,000 in 2018—approximately 2,500 of these dApps having at least one active user in the last 24 hours.
Smart contract deployment increased by 14% two weeks after Ethereum’s Merge, indicating that some developers may have been waiting for the event to launch their projects.
The report also states that the prices and smart contract development aren’t correlated. Despite a 62% drop in Ethereum prices, smart contract deployments have increased by 40% to all-time highs. And, when the price of Ethereum fell 70% from $3,450 to $1,035 in Q2 2022, smart contract deployments fell by only 4%.
According to Alchemy, Web3 libraries are overtaking traditional packages. Developers installed libraries such as Ethers.js and Web3.js more than 1,536,548 times per week, representing a 178% increase year over year. Since 2018, the number of developers installing either of these libraries on a weekly basis has increased year after year, and by 2022, that number had increased ten times from 2018’s high of 145,799 weekly downloads.
These libraries enable developers to read blockchain data from providers such as Alchemy and send transactions on their users’ behalf to facilitate deposits into DeFi protocols, the creation of NFTs, and much more.
