Electric Capital is a crypto-focused venture capital firm that also publishes research on open-source developer activity. Its work combines investing with ecosystem measurement; those roles are related, but a developer metric is not an investment recommendation or a complete measure of a network’s health.
What Electric Capital does
The firm describes its team as engineer-led. Its current team page lists Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer as co-founders. Alongside investing in crypto companies and networks, Electric Capital built the Developer Report and a public dashboard intended to make crypto code activity easier to compare. The topic sits at the intersection of Crypto Venture Capital, Blockchain and DeFi.
What the Developer Report measures
The report estimates activity in public, open-source repositories associated with crypto ecosystems. Electric Capital describes a pipeline that gathers candidate repositories, assigns them to ecosystems using code and dependency signals, tracks original code contributions, and filters copied work, forks, bots, and duplicate developer identities. The firm says the pipeline is iterative and that no filtering method is perfect.
This is a measure of observable open-source software activity, not a census of every person working in crypto. Closed-source work, testing, release engineering, product design, and other contributions may be missed. A commit count also does not directly measure code quality, user demand, revenue, or security.
How to read the 2024 findings
Electric Capital’s 2024 annual report analyzed 902 million code commits across 1.7 million repositories. It reported that total developers declined 7% during 2024, while developers with at least two years of tenure grew 27% year over year and produced 70% of the code. These figures describe the report’s dataset and definitions; they should not be read as a forecast or as a ranking of investment returns.
The annual report series currently ends with 2024, while the project separately maintains a live dashboard and open data. When comparing numbers, check the date, metric, ecosystem attribution, and whether the figure comes from the annual report or the changing dashboard.
Limits and interpretation
Repository classification depends on the project taxonomy and the firm’s heuristics, and the methodology can change as teams and repositories evolve. Cross-chain repositories and contributors may also be attributed to more than one ecosystem under the project’s rules. The report is useful as one signal of builder activity, but should be combined with evidence about users, shipped products, decentralization, security, and economic sustainability.
Social Media Sentiment
- Reddit, r/CryptoCurrency (December 22, 2024): A small Polygon-focused post offered a favorable reading of the report’s regional and developer figures. Replies included both approval and a question about whether developer activity settles concerns around POL token economics. This is an old, asset-specific discussion with limited participation; it does not establish general sentiment about Electric Capital or independently validate the post’s claims. Read the discussion.
Last updated: 2026-10
Related Terms
See Also
- Does Ethereum TPS Include Layer 2 Transactions?
- Are Layer 2 Networks Actually Decentralized?
- How Do Crypto Bridges Work — And Why Are They Such a Hack Target?
- ChangeNOW — crypto exchange service
Sources
- Electric Capital team — Confirms the firm’s engineer-led positioning and identifies Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer as co-founders.
- 2024 Developer Report — Reports 902 million commits across 1.7 million repositories and its 2024 developer-count and tenure findings.
- Developer Report methodology and limitations — Explains repository sourcing, classification, duplicate and bot filtering, open-source scope, and known limitations.