Weekly code commits to crypto and blockchain projects have collapsed 75 percent since early 2025 as developers defect to AI work, and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is now warning that artificial intelligence, not quantum computers, could be the first thing to break the cryptography protecting what's left.
Ask a computer science graduate in 2026 where the money and the momentum are, and the answer isn't Solidity or Rust anymore. It's AI. Weekly code commits to crypto and blockchain repositories have fallen from roughly 850,000 a week to about 210,000 since early 2025, a 75 percent drop, according to data from analytics platform Artemis reported by CoinDesk. Active developers working on blockchain projects fell 56 percent over the same stretch, down to around 4,600 people. That's not a soft patch. That's an exodus.
The destination is obvious. GitHub added 36 million new developers in 2025 alone, pushing its global base past 180 million, with platform wide commits rising roughly 25 percent year over year, per CoinDesk's reporting. Repositories built around Jupyter Notebooks, the standard tool for machine learning work, grew about 75 percent. Dockerfile repositories tied to AI applications jumped roughly 120 percent. The engineers who used to write smart contracts are now shipping AI infrastructure, on the same platform, just pointed somewhere else.
Individual chains show the damage up close. Ethereum's weekly active developer count dropped 34 percent over three months to 2,811. Solana shed 40 percent, falling to 942 developers as of March, according to Artemis. Base, Coinbase's layer 2 network, lost 52 percent of its developers, down to 378. These aren't obscure chains. They're the three networks crypto built its entire 2026 institutional pitch around.
Younger engineers are taking the hardest hit.
Crypto.news reported that software developers aged 22 to 25 have lost nearly 20 percent of their employment since late 2022, the exact point generative AI tools went mainstream, while developers 30 and older at the same companies saw employment grow 6 to 12 percent. Blockchain leaned heavily on young, self taught engineers who piled in during the 2021 bull run. That's precisely the workforce this shift is hollowing out.
Here's the part that should worry crypto more than any commit chart. In May, Yakovenko warned publicly that AI could break the post-quantum cryptography blockchain networks are racing to adopt, and that it might get there before quantum computers do. He said the industry doesn't yet understand the mathematical and implementation weaknesses in these newer signature schemes well enough, and that AI tools already available today could find and exploit them before anyone builds a defense. His proposed fix is a 2-of-3 multisig setup spread across different signature systems, rather than betting a wallet on one scheme. He didn't spare Ethereum either, warning that its layer 2 networks aren't quantum safe.
Put those two stories together and the picture sharpens. Blockchain isn't becoming irrelevant. Bitcoin's swings this year have tracked macro conditions, not GitHub activity. What's actually happening is narrower and more dangerous: crypto is losing the engineers who audit its cryptography and harden its infrastructure at the exact moment AI is getting sharp enough to attack it.
There's a wrinkle in that story worth being honest about. Not every chain is shrinking. SolanaFloor and KuCoin both reported that Solana's own developer count rebounded through the first half of 2026, climbing past 10,700 active contributors by mid-year and, by some counts, overtaking Ethereum, after pulling in more new developers in 2025 than Ethereum did. So this isn't
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