‘That Is Nothing’: Few Developers Prepared for Looming Blockchain Revolution

Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize financial services and will produce “astonishing creative destruction” and “even more upheaval than the Internet’s first information era,” according to The Globe and Mail.

“It is an unstoppable force that will make itself felt in almost every facet of our lives.”

So why, then, do so few in the tech world actually understand what blockchain is and how to leverage it?

What Blockchain Asks of Developers

Part of the answer is that blockchain development is genuinely different from ordinary software work. A blockchain is a shared ledger that many computers keep in sync, with no central database to fix when something goes wrong. Building on one means understanding cryptography, how a network of strangers agrees on the next entry, and how incentives keep that network honest.

Applications on blockchains, often called smart contracts, also carry unusual stakes. Once code is deployed it can be hard or impossible to change, and it may control real money from day one. A bug that would be a quick patch in a web app can be permanent. That combination of new concepts, new tools and very little room for error is why experienced blockchain developers were so scarce in 2017.

The Developer Shortage

William Mougayar, a blockchain author, investor, and advisor, says developers are catching on, but not quickly enough.

Mougayar is the author of The Business Blockchain, published by Wiley in 2016 with a foreword by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. He made the point about developers at the BC Tech Summit in Vancouver in March 2017:

.@wmougayar says there are not enough #blockchain developers…and that’s a big problem for the industry #BCTECH #BCTECHSummit pic.twitter.com/g9TUCEBYLL

— TechPortfolio (@TechPortfolio) March 16, 2017

“I’ve been estimating the number of software developers that know the blockchain,” he says. “And last year it was about 5,000 to 7,000 in the whole world. Now we’re probably pushing 30,000 to 35,000.

“That is nothing.”

Just to contrast, Mougayar estimates that there are about nine to 10 million Java developers around the world.

In other words, by Mougayar’s estimates, the entire global pool of blockchain developers was well under 1% of the size of the Java community alone.

Canada’s Wake-Up Call

Canada needs a “wake-up” call on blockchain.

Canada did have some early experiments. In 2016, Payments Canada, the Bank of Canada, the R3 consortium and several Canadian banks started Project Jasper, an experiment with a wholesale payment system built on distributed ledger technology. The Bank of Canada’s June 2017 report on the project found that a stand-alone ledger system was unlikely to beat a centralized payment system on core operating costs, though it could improve efficiency if it were integrated with the wider financial market infrastructure. Results like that showed how much careful engineering, not just enthusiasm, the technology needed.

How the Numbers Look Now

Developers did keep arriving, though the counting has changed. Venture firm Electric Capital tracked open-source crypto developers each year from 2018 to 2024. Its 2021 report found more than 18,000 monthly active developers, an all-time high at the time, with over 34,000 new developers joining that year.

The numbers then swung with the market. By the end of 2023, monthly active open-source crypto developers had fallen to 22,266 from about 29,600 a year earlier, Fortune reported, even as developers who had stayed at least two years grew by almost a third. Electric Capital’s 2024 report found total developers down 7%, but established developers at an all-time high, up 27% year over year and writing 70% of all code.

These figures aren’t directly comparable with Mougayar’s 2017 estimates. Electric Capital only counts open-source activity and has said its numbers undercount the real total. Still, they point the same way: tens of thousands of people, not millions, working on a technology that’s still expected to touch huge parts of finance and business.

What It Means for Developers

The gap Mougayar described hasn’t really closed, and it’s changed shape. Early on, anyone who understood blockchain was rare. Now the industry has a core of experienced developers who’ve stuck around through several booms and busts, and fewer newcomers who arrive only when prices are high.

For developers, that’s an opening. Skills in security, cryptography and careful smart contract design are still in short supply, and they’re the skills that last when the hype fades. For companies, especially in Canada, the lesson from 2017 still holds: if you want to build on blockchain, plan for how you’ll find or train the people who can do it.