What's been the impact of Speedrun Ethereum on the Ethereum developer ecosystem?
Every developer ecosystem faces the same question: are your onboarding programs actually working, or just generating vanity metrics?
Speedrun Ethereum (SRE) is one of the most recognizable developer programs in crypto — a self-paced challenge series that has attracted over 17,000 signups since launch. But signing up is easy. The harder question is whether SRE is converting newcomers into sustained Ethereum contributors.
We conducted this analysis as part of a broader inquiry into the state of the Ethereum developer ecosystem, grounded in a simple premise: developer retention is a leading indicator of ecosystem health. With AI and other ecosystems competing for ambitious developers, bottom-up programs like SRE matter more than ever. We used public data to see if it's actually working.