A coding framework tool for smart contacts has experienced considerable hockey stick like growth now reaching 150,000 total downloads.

Demi Brener, Co-founder and CEO at Zeppelin, says downloads are “growing at 11% week-over-week,” before sharing this graph:

The framework launched in late 2016 during the second Devcon held in Shanghai. At the time, it was seeing less than 100 downloads, but that rose to above 1,000 at the time of Devcon three in Mexico.

Since then, it has seen considerable growth for much of 2018, now at around 7,500 downloads per week.

That suggests a lot of coders are learning solidity or coding smart contacts, with OpenZeppelin providing most of the tools needed to work on dapps.

They further have a number of smart contract templates to get you going with hands on coding, and the project itself seems to court much respect from devs going by the ETHGlobal hackathon in Argentina.

Searches for smart contract and solidity have remained near their all time high for much of this year, with China considerably leading in interest according to Google searches.

Truffle has also seen a considerable increase in interest, with the smart contracts development environment attracting 80,000 downloads a month.

They further have a localserver like “personal blockchain” for testing called Ganache which is seeing some 50,000 downloads a month.

All that suggests the ethereum ecosystem, including dapp developers as well as individuals learning to code smart contracts, probably amounts to around 200,000 developers.

The Ethereum Foundation itself has only “90 full-time altogether,” according to Vitalik Buterin. Most of them are devs, but some are support staff.

On the other hand, ConsenSys had some 200 open positions in March, while Coinbase had around 150 such open positions in June.

You then add all the ICO-ed and non ICO-ed dapps, of which there were 1,200 in April this year, and you can easily get to 20,000-30,000 devs.

Then you need to account for all the global brands, including governments, including numerous projects, with just the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance having some 500 members. Making the estimate of 200,000 eth devs somewhat reasonable.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com