Crypto Development Activity Plunges 75% as Developers Shift to AI Infrastructure

GitHub is a leading global code-hosting and collaboration platform, and repository activity on the service is often used to track the movement of talent across software ecosystems. The cryptocurrency industry has long relied on open-source developers to advance public blockchains, wallets and DeFi protocols. Their shift toward AI could weaken blockchain projects' capacity for maintenance, innovation and security updates.

GitHub data show that weekly code commits to crypto projects have fallen by about 75% since the start of 2025, while the number of active developers has dropped 56%. Public blockchains have been hit particularly hard. Over the same period, AI-related repositories and large language model (LLM) projects have expanded rapidly, drawing millions of contributors into AI infrastructure.