State of the Cardano Developer Ecosystem Survey: 2025 Edition

he Cardano Foundation has just published the results of the 2025 State of the Cardano Developer Ecosystem Survey. We had exactly 109 developers responding to this year’s edition, most with over seven years of experience deploying software.

While the number of respondents has gone down year on year since the survey launched back in 2022, the quality of the replies has increased. In part, this happened because we became better at removing bots. At the same time, the survey seems to have attracted more experienced developers each year.

The general number of participants also aligns with the stats presented in the Developer Report published by Electric Capital, especially considering how, in any given ecosystem, only a small fraction of people take part in surveys such as this.

According to Electric Capital’s 2024 findings, Cardano has a total of 672 active developers, of which only 276 work at a full-time capacity. This places Cardano 15th among the leading ecosystems for monthly active developers.

Top 10 takeaways from the 2025 edition

From languages, libraries, or services used to the types of decentralized applications (DApps) most developers have taken an interest in, this year’s survey bore some interesting results about the reality of building on Cardano.

• TypeScript (15%), JavaScript (13%), and Python (10%) appeared as the top three programming languages Cardano developers are proficient in.
• More than 75% of respondents reported using Aiken to write smart contracts, with Aiken also ranking fourth (8%) on top proficiency languages right before Haskell (7%).
• Most respondents work on Cardano professionally (75%), with around 30% employed by one of three genesis entities (IOG, the Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO).
• Almost 45% have worked, or still work, in other blockchain ecosystems.
• In terms of technical priorities, higher throughput via solutions like Ouroboros Leios was identified as the most pressing one, closely followed by better documentation and explainers.
• Developers named identity and authentication as the type of Cardano DApps they are working on or care about the most, followed by decentralized finance (DeFi) and stablecoins. Core infrastructure ranked third.
• Mesh (12,7%), written in JavaScript, Lucid-evolution (11,5%) and Cardano-js-sdk (9,9%), both written in TypeScript, formed the top three libraries Cardano developers use in their projects.
• Blockfrost (16%), Ogmios (12,5%), Cardano-db-sync (10,9%), Kupo (8,9%), and Cardano-wallet (6,9%) stood as the top five self-hosted/local services.
• In matters of hosted services and platforms, the survey placed Blockfrost (24,6%), CExplorer (12%), Demeter.run (11,7%), CardanoScan (10,4%), and Koios (7,9%) in the top five.
• A majority of developers named source code (14,9%) as their go-to for technical details on Cardano, with project-specific documentation (13,6%) closely following. The Cardano Developer Portal (12,7%) and the Cardano Docs website (12,7%) tied in third place.

The Foundation thanks everyone who took the time to reply to the survey. And, as always, we encourage everyone to discover the full results and use the collaborative GitHub discussion board to keep the conversation going and derive further analysis.

A consequential survey

Since its inception, this initiative has helped us not only to share knowledge and champion a thriving ecosystem, but indeed direct our technical efforts.

In earlier years, smart contract tooling was the number one pain point, which led us to invest in the development of Aiken as a programming language fit to simplify the creation of Cardano smart contracts.

Similarly, the Foundation’s technical teams kept working on elm-cardano with a view to establishing a good reference implementation for transaction building.

The survey also allowed us to confirm that some of the tools we maintain remain useful. Key examples include Ogmios, Kupo, cardano-addresses, cardano-wallet, and graph-ql. At the same time, it highlighted how tools such as DAB and ledger-sync met with little adoption, making them no longer worth, or logical to pursue.

Overall, the survey becomes an important resource when the Foundation decides on a priority list. For instance, it informs what language we work on first, the editor we target when making an integration, or which tool we support for building an interface.

Some Project Catalyst proposals and treasury withdrawal requests have likewise mentioned the survey to justify their demand.

Given the survey’s clear usefulness not just within the Foundation but for the Cardano community at large, this year we also shifted to an open-source survey platform. This way, we can open source the survey engine itself, enabling others to reuse it for their own needs.

As we move into 2026, the Foundation intends to keep on driving this annual assessment of the habits, needs, and sometimes hidden heroes of the Cardano developer ecosystem.