SharpLink CEO: How to understand that Ethereum developers have just surpassed 1 million?

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Author: Joseph Chalom

Translation: Jiahui, ChainCatcher

I just returned from Asia, where I spent some time with Ethereum developers and ecosystem leaders. Special thanks to Nonce Classic, Four Pillars, and DSRV in Seoul, as well as our friends at SNZ, and the recently opened Ethereum Community Center in Hong Kong. This center is Asia’s first long-term operational physical Ethereum community space, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

What impressed me most was not just the vibrancy there, but the rigor and ambition of the builders. The high-caliber projects, experimental spirit, and long-term thinking emerging from the global Ethereum ecosystem deeply inspired me.

This also made a series of numbers come alive: Data from Electric Capital shows that the total number of developers in Ethereum’s history has now surpassed one million, with 1,012,824 individuals contributing to the ecosystem. No other ecosystem in crypto can compare.

A milestone worth noting

One million is an integer, and sometimes integers can seem hollow. But this number is anything but. It represents the largest pool of technical talent ever assembled around an open, permissionless blockchain network. More importantly, this talent pool continues to deepen and expand.

Among these one million developers, about 232k have been active in the past twelve months.

Why Ethereum: The truly important question

For years, discussions in crypto have revolved around speed, fees, and throughput. Every new chain claims to be "faster than Ethereum." But the core question in crypto has never been which chain is fastest, but another:

"Where will the top builders choose to build long-term?"

On this front, Ethereum still holds a clear advantage. This advantage is not just technical; it’s a combination of governance, culture, economics, and ecosystem structure. It’s the result of a decade of development—developers, infrastructure, standards, tools, liquidity, research, applications, and social coordination—that no other ecosystem can replicate.

Ethereum has become the default operating system for programmable finance and internet-native capital formation.

What these one million builders are building, and why it can reinforce the moat

The importance of this one million builders lies in what they are doing right now. Today’s focus is on the most difficult and riskiest problems in the industry: scalability, privacy, quantum resistance of core protocols, and the intelligent systems running on top of them.

Glamsterdam upgrade: Innovating without breaking core principles. The Glamsterdam upgrade, scheduled for 2026, demonstrates how Ethereum can continue to advance while adhering to core values. Key changes include built-in proposer-constructer separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs), unlocking parallel execution and higher throughput, with the potential to increase the Gas limit and significantly boost Layer 1 capacity.

Scaling for future demands while defending trustlessness, security, and MEV fairness—this itself is an evolving moat.

Synchronous composability: Making many rollups operate as one chain. Composability has always been Ethereum’s superpower; the next leap is extending it to Layer 2. Native rollups and based rollups combined with synchronous composability solve this problem. Contracts on one rollup can call contracts on the mainnet or another rollup in a single atomic transaction, without bridging or waiting.

Linea, Ethereum Economic Zone, Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation are collaborating to combine this design with real-time proofs. The result is that dozens of rollups no longer operate as isolated networks but start functioning as a unified chain. This is a direct response to the criticism of fragmentation.

Quantum resistance: Ethereum’s most obvious competitive edge. No mainstream ecosystem has prepared more thoroughly for the post-quantum era. The "Lean Ethereum" roadmap, the Ethereum Foundation’s post-quantum security team established in early 2026, pq.ethereum.org, and over a dozen client teams running weekly post-quantum interoperability testnets all form a coordinated open-source migration targeted for around 2029.

When quantum risks become reality, institutions holding trillions in assets will care only about one thing: which chain is earliest and most thoroughly prepared.

Beyond developer moat: composability, standards, and trust

The aggregation of developer talent creates a compounding effect, thanks to how Ethereum is built. Its deepest network effect isn’t liquidity but the depth of its composability: applications like interoperable financial Lego blocks.

Lending, stablecoins, exchanges, wallets, tokenized assets, oracles, and Layer 2 rollups—all interact through shared standards, so developers never have to start from scratch. The EVM is the application layer of crypto; Solidity skills are transferable across Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and hundreds of other networks.

Learning Ethereum’s tech stack maximizes choice, fueling a flywheel: more developers, more tools, more liquidity, more institutions, attracting even more builders to create composable protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds liquidity; composability breeds more composability.

And Ethereum dominates where value truly consolidates, not just where hype is loudest:

Three forces reinforce this leadership.

Trustlessness: Ethereum is secured by over 900k validators, compared to about 800 on Solana. Large institutions highly value this level of decentralization and platform neutrality.

Modularity: Rollups like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism don’t fragment Ethereum but extend it into an increasingly interconnected modular internet economy, inheriting the security of the mainnet.

Culture: Ethereum attracts top-tier researchers, cryptographers, and EIP standard setters far beyond other ecosystems, setting the industry’s direction. This is also the hardest advantage for others to copy.

There is only one Ethereum in the world

There is an essential difference between generating on-chain activity and becoming the long-term coordination layer of internet-native finance. The latter means becoming the layer trusted by the world’s largest financial institutions.

Ethereum firmly occupies the cognitive high ground among large asset holders, who prioritize trust, security, and liquidity. During my time at BlackRock, I witnessed this firsthand from the front lines.

In tech markets, ecosystems tend to consolidate over time around standards, liquidity, and developer attention. That is Ethereum’s moat.

After engaging with developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul and Hong Kong, I am more convinced than ever of Ethereum’s competitive edge. I met talented people building the next-generation financial infrastructure—our industry’s future founders and architects of intelligent agent finance. It is these people and teams who will change the world.

Ethereum’s future is unfolding.