The state of
Black in Blockchain.
A transcontinental audit of developer activity across 54 African nations and 22 Caribbean countries & territories — rendered from the ledger itself.
active developers across the continent and its islands — working on 127 ecosystems, in 94 named cities, over the last twenty-eight days.
A geography of code.
Commits per country over the lifetime of the Electric Capital index — scoped strictly to Africa and the Caribbean.
Saturation follows log-scaled volume. Every country we see, we name.
Twelve cities.
Principle 04, made literal. Not “Africa.” Not “the Caribbean.” Lagos. Nairobi. Port-au-Prince.
Ranked by active developers across the last 28 days of the snapshot.
Eight ecosystems.
Where the work lands. Top eight protocols by scoped developer count, with their 48-month trajectory indexed to 100 at the series start.
Shape, not volume. This is the grammar of growth.
An arriving wave.
Monthly active developers, split by tenure since first tracked commit: newcomers (0–1y), the apprenticed (1–2y), the elders (2y+).
Read it as a question: are we onboarding, or are we staying?
What the data sees.
A dashboard is only as honest as its methodology. The ledger is specific; so are its blind spots.
We prefer to name them at the front, not bury them in a footnote.
✓ What we count
- Developers whose inferred location — from GitHub profile, commit email domain, and timezone metadata — falls within one of the 76 countries in scope.
- Any commit attributed to an ecosystem in Electric Capital’s taxonomy. “Active” = at least one commit in the last 28 days of the snapshot.
- First commit across any ecosystem, which anchors each developer’s tenure bucket.
- All public repositories indexed by Electric Capital at the time of the weekly snapshot.
✕ What we don’t
- Diaspora developers working from London, Montreal, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo. The dataset is geographic, not racial — we refuse to infer the latter from the former.
- Private repositories, non-public work, and anything off-chain that doesn’t surface as a commit.
- Self-declared identity of any kind. Electric Capital infers location; we don’t override that inference.
- Activity before an ecosystem joined the EC taxonomy — some young protocols are undercounted early.
Signed on-chain,
this ledger, this hour.
This report refreshes every Monday at 06:00 UTC against Electric Capital’s weekly snapshot. Corrections, additions, and country-name resolutions welcomed at the steering assembly.