The Crypto Winter is Here. How’s the Web3 Industry Holding Up?

Prices down, devs up.

By Venci from the Oort team

While cryptocurrency investors are still struggling to recover from the sell-off in bitcoin and other digital currencies, some fear the worst is yet to come. The entire cryptocurrency market lost more than $1 trillion in value after a record-high level of Bitcoin’s drop, followed by the decline of other top tokens like Ether(ETH) and Solana(SOL). The significant loss in total crypto market capitalization foreshadows another "crypto winter," a phrase referring to a prolonged period of asset prices in the crypto market. The last crypto winter occurred in late 2017 and early 2018, when bitcoin plunged as much as 80% from all-time highs.

But here’s the silver lining of this crypto winter: the best entrepreneurs are building better companies. Now is the time for the market to focus less on token prices and more on solving real problems. Bear market fosters long-term sustainability of projects and protect projects from short-term, speculative attention.

Our Director of Systems Engineering, Ventseslav Sapundzhiev (Venci) took a deep dive into Alchemy’s Web3 Developer Report of Q3 2022 and here’s what he found: Web3 developers are more active than ever amidst the crypto winter, especially on the Ethereum network. There has been a rapid 14% smart contract deployment since Ethereum shifted its working mechanism from PoW (Proof-of-work) to PoS (Proof-of-stake). It is likely that developers were waiting on the successful launch of Ethereum Merge to deploy their smart contracts. 

Core libraries and development tools are being downloaded at record levels. Downloads have increased 10-fold this year to 1.5 million downloads per week combined for Ethers.js and Web3.js, two of the most important blockchain development libraries. This metric alone speaks to a large and growing interest in building applications on Ethereum.

Source: Alchemy, Web3 Developer Report (Q3 2022)

Smart contract deployment is another key indicator of activity on Web3 developers. In September, developers submitted more than 17,000 smart contracts on Etherscan. This represents a year-on-year increase of 160% as the development of decentralized protocols increases sharply.

Source: Alchemy, Web3 Developer Report (Q3 2022)

The growth of decentralized applications(dApps) is another indicator of healthy ecosystem development. There are currently 12,500 dApps across all networks, a number which was just 1,000 in 2018, according to DappRadar.

Source: Alchemy, Web3 Developer Report (Q3 2022)

This vibrant community of web3 developers continues to create useful and enduring products that are changing how we connect with one another, with the internet, and with everything, despite the wildest market conditions in a generation.

The prices of tokens may fluctuate, but good products are the key to the widespread adoption of Web3. That's why Oort teamed up with Storj to host a virtual hackathon, the Web3 Stack Hack. We invite developers to come and build applications that meet real-world needs with decentralized storage infrastructure while giving them full control of their earnings, thus flourishing the Web3 ecosystem from the bottom-up.

On top of that, Oort also has bounty programs ongoing on Gitcoin, in which developers will have the chance to win $3,000 for helping us debug and improve our mainnet codes.