Electric Capital

Electric Capital is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has invested more than $3 billion across 100-plus technology startups since its founding in 2018. The firm backs founders from pre-seed through Series A, writing checks of $1 million to $15 million or more, with a focus on artificial intelligence, cryptography, distributed systems, fintech, and healthcare. Its portfolio companies carry a cumulative market capitalization exceeding $50 billion.

Engineer-Led Firm, Engineer-Backed Founders

The distinguishing feature of Electric Capital's approach is that every investing partner writes production code. Co-founders Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer, along with General Partners Ken Deeter and Maria Shen, each came to investing through engineering careers rather than finance. Garg previously worked on Facebook Connect at Facebook and on the Google Assistant team at Google; he also founded Spool, which Facebook acquired. The firm's stated premise is that investors who build software can provide technical support, product design, architecture review, and network introductions that generalist investors cannot match.

The firm is explicit that it measures ecosystem health through developer activity and on-chain data rather than through analyst forecasts or sentiment. That orientation shaped its most significant public contribution: the crypto Developer Report.

Portfolio: Solana and Broader Ecosystem

Electric Capital holds positions across the major smart contract platforms and in the infrastructure layers built on them. Its Solana-specific investments include [[PROJECT:228]] (transaction infrastructure and MEV tooling), [[PROJECT:272]] (digital collectibles marketplace), and Ellipsis Labs (perpetual futures trading infrastructure). The portfolio also contains a direct stake in Solana itself, taken during the network's early growth period.

Outside Solana, notable positions include Kraken, NEAR, Mysten Labs, Monad, Sui, Aave, dYdX, Curve Finance, Immunefi, and Certora. Several holdings have been acquired — Privy, Bitnomial, Fordefi, and others — and the portfolio now extends into AI infrastructure with positions in compute and data companies. The firm targets founders building in areas where eroding trust in traditional institutions creates demand for trust-minimized alternatives, a thesis that spans crypto infrastructure, identity systems, government data, and creator monetization.

The Developer Report: Annual Benchmark for Crypto Activity

Electric Capital's Developer Report, published annually since 2019, became the de facto industry benchmark for measuring open-source activity across crypto ecosystems. The methodology covers more than 100 million open-source code commits, tracking monthly active developers across thousands of protocols and chains. The underlying taxonomy — a community-curated GitHub repository classifying crypto projects and their repositories — now has more than 1,000 external contributors, and the firm supplements it with automated pipelines that scan GitHub, GitLab, and social media for new ecosystems and repositories.

The 2024 edition, released in December 2024, found 23,613 monthly active developers across all of crypto as of November 2024, essentially flat from the prior year with a seven percent decline. Within that broadly stable picture, Solana was the standout: it attracted 7,625 new developers during the year, more than any other chain and roughly 1,000 more than Ethereum. Year-over-year, Solana's developer ecosystem grew 83 percent. In July 2024, Solana became the first blockchain since 2016 to onboard more new developers in a single month than Ethereum — a benchmark that Electric Capital specifically tracks as a leading indicator of ecosystem momentum.

:::callout{type="data" label="2024 Developer Report: Solana" source="Electric Capital, December 2024"} Solana attracted 7,625 new developers in 2024 — the most of any chain — with 83% year-over-year growth. In July 2024, it became the first blockchain since 2016 to onboard more new monthly developers than Ethereum. :::

The same report found Ethereum's monthly developer base at 6,244, a 17 percent decline, though 56 percent of those developers work on Layer 2 networks including Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum. On a geographic basis, Asia surpassed North America to become the continent with the most blockchain developers; India led globally in new developer recruitment at 17 percent of the world total, while the United States remained the top single country at 19 percent of overall active developers.

General Partner Maria Shen, who leads the firm's research work, noted at the time that "the share of developers who have worked in crypto for more than two years grew in 2024," indicating that veteran developer retention held even as inflows of new participants were uneven across ecosystems.

Open Dev Data: From Annual Report to Continuous Platform

In early 2025, Electric Capital announced it was retiring the standalone annual Developer Report format and replacing it with Open Dev Data, a continuously updated open-source platform available at opendevdata.org. The scale of their data operation made an annual PDF format inadequate: the firm tracks thousands of ecosystems, millions of developers, and hundreds of millions of commits in near real-time.

The platform has two components. The taxonomy — the community-curated repository that classifies crypto ecosystems and their code repositories — continues as a living open-source project, augmented by AI agents that search code forges and social media for new entries and supplemented by commit fingerprinting and developer deduplication algorithms that identify original repositories and unique authors. The datasets, built on top of that taxonomy, are published in parquet format compatible with standard analytics tools including DuckDB, Spark, and Databricks. Builders, researchers, and foundations can pull the data and run their own analyses without depending on Electric Capital's annual publication cycle.

The 2025 data through September showed Ethereum leading with 16,181 new developers since January — its strongest inflow figure in the dataset's history — while Solana ranked second with approximately 11,500 new developers over the same period. Total active developers on Solana reached 17,708; Ethereum's broader developer base, including its Layer 2 networks, stood at 31,869. Electric Capital also acknowledged that its Solana counts may be conservative, as the Solana Foundation has argued that the taxonomy's repository coverage of the Solana ecosystem remains incomplete relative to the actual activity on the ground.

Solana Keynote at Breakpoint 2025

Electric Capital presented at Solana's Breakpoint 2025 conference, where the team argued that Solana's cost advantages had driven a four-fold increase in on-chain application revenue and outlined a case for 300 million centralized-exchange users migrating to blockchain applications. The presentation synthesized the firm's on-chain data work with its broader thesis about the economics of decentralized finance at scale.

Summary

Electric Capital operates at the intersection of early-stage crypto investing and ecosystem measurement. Its portfolio stakes span Solana's infrastructure layer through Jito and Magic Eden, and its research function — from the annual Developer Report through the Open Dev Data platform — gives the broader industry a common vocabulary for tracking which ecosystems are winning developers. The firm's position as both investor in and analyst of the Solana ecosystem makes its annual metrics unusually consequential: when Electric Capital's data shows Solana leading in developer recruitment, that finding circulates through the industry as sourced evidence rather than advocacy.