The year of 2024 brought many things to fruition within the Ethereum ecosystem, most of which revolved around the improvement of much needed scaling infrastructure that was required in order to accommodate an extremely rapid surge in demand. EIP-4844, for example, was a necessary upgrade to the Ethereum protocol that allowed rollups, like Arbitrum One, to reduce the cost of user transactions by many multiples. Today, the Ethereum community finds itself in a unique position, where blockspace is in abundance, and developers have become the scarce resource. Naturally, this begs the question, where are the developers?

Accessibility is Everything

According to Electric Capital’s 2024 developer report, there are currently 23,000+ monthly active developers who are building on at least some type of blockchain, and out of that sum, only 6,000+ of them are building within the Ethereum economy, which suggests that the number of developers who are well-versed in Solidity remains very low. If we compare this pool to the 25M+ software developers who are proficient in programming languages that aren’t Solidity, all of a sudden, the onchain economy starts to look minuscule and relatively untapped on a global scale. This isn’t to say that the onchain economy isn’t thriving, it absolutely is, however, it’s time to think bigger.

Let’s take a step back for a moment, and assess the playing field that a software engineer would likely face after completing their studies at University (or some other form of higher education). Generally, most young developers are competent in one or more programming languages that would include either Python, Java, and C++, at least in the early stages of their career. A lot of the time it is quite common for developers to simply remain within this already widely-adopted language scope, as most engineering jobs don’t require developers to learn and fine-tune other, more specialized programming languages. When it comes to building on a public blockchain like Ethereum, or one of its high-performance L2s, it requires the developer to gain a deep understanding of how the EVM functions, and requires mastery of an entirely new, much more niche programming language (Solidity). As you can see, accessibility and convenience is the blocker when it comes to onboarding developers who have never touched a blockchain before. Fortunately, this can be considered a growing pain that the brightest minds in Ethereum are working hard to resolve -- one such tool is Arbitrum Stylus.

Building on Ethereum is no Longer a Specialty

L2 scaling solutions have become the default onboarding vehicles to the Ethereum’s onchain economy over the last 12-24 months, with Arbitrum One proving itself to be the popular choice for Ethereum developers. Up until the back half of 2024, Ethereum’s L2 economy began to saturate the niche pool of Solidity developers. That is, until the launch of Stylus, Arbitrum’s leading, industry-first solution built to break down the accessibility barrier that Ethereum faces.

Stylus does many things, most importantly, it makes building on Ethereum simple. Gone are the days where software engineers are required to spend hundreds of hours learning a new and unfamiliar programming language that is specific to the EVM, just to get a foot in the door. With a tool like Stylus, real world developers who are bustling with talent can use their existing toolkit to write and deploy smart contracts on Arbitrum, Ethereum’s leading L2 platform.

With the basics now out of the way, let’s establish how Stylus works its magic in the backend. Today, Stylus is fully compatible with any programming language that compiles down to WebAssembly (WASM), which, for those who don’t know, is a compiler that allows developers to run code that is written in multiple languages, such as Rust, C, and C++. Stylus operates as a co-equal virtual machine that integrates flawlessly with the EVM, a true representation of what it means to blur the lines between the traditional web, and Ethereum’s onchain economy.

Together we Can Bring the World Onchain

As you can see, Stylus is a definitive answer to the question that we have all been asking ourselves, that is, “how do we bring more developers to the Ethereum ecosystem?”

From here on out, this becomes a community effort, one of collaboration that will allow us to put Ethereum’s application layer on the world stage. But for this to happen, we can’t expect developers to come to us and learn our ways. We need to bring the onchain economy to them, which includes tailoring our solutions to fit their existing developer toolkits, allowing them to contribute to the infinite garden with little to no barrier to entry.

To round out this post, I’ll leave you with this. In order for Ethereum to succeed in its mission to serve the world as a maximally secure, decentralized, onchain economy, we must first, as a community, continue to make Ethereum more accessible to talented developers. If we don’t succeed in doing this, Ethereum will likely remain a very niche platform, where only a small percentage of the world's developers have the skillset to make use of its benefits.

Personally, I’m optimistic about the future, and so is Arbitrum given the amount of work that has been put into swiftly delivering a working product of the highest quality. Together, we can help do our part as Ethereum community members, and spread this message to all corners of the industry.

Real world developers are coming to Ethereum, and it begins with Stylus.