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

Author: Joseph Chalom

Compiled by: Jiahua, 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 the first long-term operational physical Ethereum community space in Asia, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

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

This also brings a string of numbers to life: Electric Capital's data shows that the total number of historical Ethereum developers has now surpassed one million, with 1,012,824 individuals contributing to this ecosystem. No other ecosystem in the crypto space can compare.

A Milestone Worth Noting

One million is a round number, and round numbers can sometimes feel hollow. But this number is anything but that. It represents the largest pool of technical talent ever assembled around an open, permissionless blockchain network. More importantly, this talent pool is continuously deepening and expanding.

Among these one million developers, approximately 232,000 have remained active in the past twelve months.

Why Ethereum: The Real Question

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

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

On this question, Ethereum still holds a clear advantage. This advantage is not only reflected in the technical realm; it is a comprehensive embodiment of institutions, culture, economy, and ecological structure, the result of a decade of developers, infrastructure, standards, tools, liquidity, research, applications, and social coordination continuously accumulating, which no other ecosystem can replicate.

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

What These Million Builders Are Constructing and Why It Strengthens the Moat

The importance of a million builders lies in what they are currently doing. The focus today is on the most challenging and riskiest problems in the industry: scalability of core protocols, privacy, quantum resistance, and the intelligent systems that will run on them.

Glamsterdam Upgrade: Innovating Without Compromising Core Principles. The Glamsterdam upgrade, expected in 2026, showcases how Ethereum continues to advance while adhering to its core values. Key changes include built-in proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs), unlocking parallel execution and higher throughput, with the potential to increase gas limits, significantly enhancing Layer 1 capacity.

Expanding capacity for future demands while defending trusted neutrality, security, and MEV fairness is itself an evolving moat.

Synchronous Composability: Making Multiple Rollups Operate Like One Chain. Composability has always been Ethereum's superpower; the next leap is to extend it to Layer 2. Native Rollups and Based Rollups combined with synchronous composability address this issue. A contract on one Rollup can call a contract 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 begin to function like a unified chain. This is a direct response to fragmentation criticism.

Quantum Resistance: Ethereum's Most Obvious Competitive Advantage. 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 development testnets collectively form a coordinated open-source migration aimed for around 2029.

When quantum risks become a reality, the only thing institutions managing trillions of dollars in assets will care about is: which chain is best prepared, earliest and most thoroughly.

Beyond Developer Moats: Composability, Standards, and Trust

The gathering of developer talent creates a compounding effect, thanks to the way Ethereum itself is built. Its deepest network effect is not liquidity but the depth of composability: various applications function like interoperable financial Lego blocks.

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

Learning the Ethereum tech stack means maximizing choice space, thereby driving the flywheel effect: more developers, more tools, more liquidity, more institutions, which in turn attract more developers to build composable protocols and assets. Liquidity breeds liquidity, and composability breeds composability.

Moreover, Ethereum dominates where value truly accumulates, not just where the momentum is greatest:

Three forces reinforce this leading position.

Trusted Neutrality: Ethereum is secured by over 900,000 validators, while Solana has about 800. Large institutions place a high value on this level of decentralization and platform neutrality.

Modularity: Rollups like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism have not fragmented Ethereum but expanded it into an increasingly interconnected modular internet economy, inheriting the security of the mainnet.

Culture: Ethereum attracts top researchers, cryptographers, and EIP standard drafters far beyond other ecosystems, setting the direction for the entire industry. This is also the advantage that other ecosystems find hardest to replicate.

There Is Only One Ethereum

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

Ethereum firmly occupies the cognitive high ground of large asset holders, who value trust, security, and liquidity the most. I witnessed this firsthand from the front row during my time at BlackRock.

In the tech market, ecosystems consolidate over time around standards, liquidity, and developer attention. This is Ethereum's moat.

After engaging with these developers, builders, and ecosystem leaders in Seoul and Hong Kong, I am more convinced than ever of Ethereum's competitive advantage. I met the talent building the next generation of financial infrastructure, the founders of our industry's future, and the architects of agent-based finance. It is these individuals and teams that will change the world.

The future of Ethereum is unfolding.