Put developers at the center of web3

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Web3 development has stopped. The concepts that dominate the current crypto cycle (L2s, DeFi, RWAs, gaming and prediction markets) originated from the previous cycle. We are not growing and innovating; We are stuck.

The Web3 developer community has done historic work, but it’s vanishingly small; approximately 22,000, less than 0.1% of the estimated 27 million developers worldwide. We can’t onboard the “next billion users” until we onboard the first million developers. To achieve these, we need to empower developers by treating them as creators and not just developers, embracing AI development tools, and fostering a culture of developer collaboration.

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined his vision for the future of blockchain in his keynote at the Token2049 show recently held in Singapore: finishing the construction of the “durable digital structures” that make up the network’s ecosystem, working to make crypto faster, cheaper and easier to use. easier; and preserving the inspiring qualities of blockchain technology that distinguish it from the traditional financial system.

This is an inspiring vision. So who will do all this building and all this work? Where should the ideas to bring this vision to life come from? As we often say at Web3, “Developers, do something!”

Numbers continue to fall

But in 2023, the total number of blockchain developers fell by more than 10% due to the exodus of “newcomer” developers (those with less than a year of experience in the blockchain field), whose numbers fell by over 50% from the previous year. year. Despite the landmark launch of Ordinals last year, Bitcoin (BTC) has lost 19% of its developers, leaving only 1,000 BTC creators.

The number of Web3 developers is decreasing; We need this number to increase. So “Developers, do something!” Instead of saying “Do something for developers!” we should say. To make Web3 a more attractive home for developers, we should let them do the cooking. Here’s how.

Developers are creative, so treat them that way. Developers are innovators and innovation is creative, so developers are creative. Creativity is messy, non-linear, and doesn’t always happen as planned. Let’s stop treating developers as if their role is to compile pre-existing blocks of code into pre-designed Lego towers, because it’s not. Let’s give developers the support they need to create, test and develop new ideas.

AI is now a part of coding, so embrace it. AI is not a replacement for developers; this is a developer developer. AI is a set of developer mechanics. AI is the way Generation Z learns and writes code, greatly accelerating the learning curve for new developers. Junior developers will be able to focus on mastering concepts rather than trying to piece together missing documentation or wading through thousands of lines of code for a missing semicolon.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just for beginners. Experienced developers are already using AI-powered tools to reduce deployment time and assist with increasingly important audits of increasingly complex smart contract protocols.

My company, Cookbook, offers ChefGPT, an AI chatbot that can help spark ideas, search smart contract libraries for templates, troubleshoot problems, and more. For developers, this means it’s faster and easier to plan, build, and deploy projects on-chain. For developer relations representatives, this means developers can get responses faster in any language and time zone.

AI developer tools have an important role to play in the future of web3. Let’s make these tools available to as many developers and students as possible.

The need for a community

Developers work best when they work together; so help them collaborate. We talk a lot about community at web3, but our web3 developer community remains fragmented and isolated. Web3 developers are a small community that needs to be closer. There were (still) nearly ten times as many members on the BAYC Discord as there are web3 developers. Web2 developers are much more collaborative than web3 developers.

This can be attributed to the still evolving state of the web3 industry, where developers are often also owners, managers, investors, or have a direct interest in the success of their protocols. As a result, they may feel like they have interests that conflict with the success of others. But this doesn’t fully explain the lack of collaboration between web3 developers.

Web3 is the tribe. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and others have sometimes felt like a religious war playing out on crypto Twitter. But the truth is that we are, and always have been, moving towards a multi-chain universe where different blockchains serve different use cases with increasing degrees of interoperability. So, while fun is fun, the idea that we should be tearing each other apart over different VM builds while sacrificing humans to the Twitter algorithm is stupid. Vitalik is a Bitcoin user. Anatoly ♥️ ETH. Less strife, more building.

This means less forking and re-skinning of other people’s projects. This also means more communication and collaboration with other developers. Message boards and virtual meetings are fine, but most of true relationship building needs to happen in real life.

It’s a fact that random interactions between creative people spark creative ideas, dating back to Steve Jobs and Pixar, and even World War II-era Bell Labs. Web3 needs this energy. And we know that people are less likely to drag each other online when they need to see each other in person. So let’s meet.

A simple way to facilitate these IRL interactions is to create more shared workspaces, like the House of Web3 in San Francisco. We are lucky to have strong global crypto communities in San Francisco, New York, Lisbon, Zug, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Lagos, Sydney, so let’s enable them. Let’s go into some rooms with whiteboards and design the future together.

Web3 has made great progress in its mission to create a more open successor to Web2. We need to do more for developers to regain the momentum we had before 2022. Don’t just give work to developers. Let the developers cook.

Tyler Sehr

Tyler Sehr is a developer and creator specializing in web3 and blockchain development. He is currently the CEO and Founder of Cookbook.dev, a platform focused on simplifying smart contract development with a comprehensive library of tools for developers to easily create and deploy smart contracts. Sehr had previously founded several DeFi and web3 projects, including StockSwap and FanFare. He also co-founded Simple Breakthrough LLC, a web3 design and development agency that has supported projects such as QiDAO/Mai.Finance, BlockDuelers, and NFT Lootbox.