At Rise In, we onboard web2 developers into web3. On our website, we provide 14 online courses for developers to learn different web3 technologies - from beginner to advanced level courses that we’ve developed in partnership with leading chains. In addition, we organize IRL and online activities where devs selected from these courses come together to deploy a web3 project and build their careers together.

We’ve analyzed the data from 26,913 developers who were enrolled in these web3 courses and/or programs online and filled in an online survey about their motivations to join our web3 programs. Data was collected from 2023 August to 2024 January. 

In this report, we present the analysis related to the motivations of these developers in joining web3. We hope that the results can inform future ecosystem building efforts.

👉See full report here.

Main motivating factor to learn web3 is building skills and a career in web3 rather than starting a company or applying for grants / bounties

The main motivation of developers learning web3 technologies is to build their web3 development skills and build a career (i.e. finding employment opportunities). Interestingly, only 7% chose “getting a certificate” as a motivating factor. Only 6% of developers seem to be motivated by building their own startups or applying to bounty / grant opportunities - which is a problem considering most incentives in web3 developer outreach programs are concentrated on these three rather than providing employment opportunities. 

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There seems to be no significant differences in motivation between countries, development experience, and age

We compared different countries and couldn’t find significant differences. Since most countries’ results are similar, below we presented three of our biggest developer community countries:

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Devs with different levels of experience have similar motivations, while the most experienced devs are slightly more interested in building a startup: 

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Younger devs are more motivated by building their career in web3 while more experienced devs seem to be learning web3 because of their interest in catching up with new technologies. One of our Polkadot Substrate Development Bootcamp students was Mutlu, a systems engineer with 10+ years of work experience. What he said summarizes why these experienced engineers and developers might be interested in joining web3: “I know that this technology may not influence our lives in the immediate future. But if it does so in 5-10 years down the line, I will be prepared.” 

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Our reflections on these results

• There seems to be a contradiction between what web3 industry currently offers vs. what devs are interested: Most web3 programs try to incentivize devs with grants / bounties and hackathons that focus on finding founders. On the other hand, only less than 10% of developers are interested in grants / bounties or founding a company.
• Building a career in web3 seems to be the biggest priority and it may take time for web3 industry to provide stable job opportunities. Often, web3 and crypto adoption in developing countries is high, because there is some economic instability, often in the form of high inflation. This also comes hand in hand with youth unemployment. People who join the crypto developer ecosystem expect to find solutions to their long-term employment. These concerns may have been irrelevant to early crypto developers, but as this report shows, the growth of the developer ecosystem is coming from all around the world now, where such concerns are very relevant to newcomers. 
• The interest of experienced devs in learning web3 technologies presents a good opportunity for web3 ecosystem: Programs that would attract these developers intellectually and even give them a chance to integrate learnings into their day-to-day jobs may result in better representation of experienced devs in web3.

There may be different ways to provide career opportunities to developers that they’re looking for. Below are some ways we used:

• 1:1 career support for promising newcomer developers: Dila graduated from our Polkadot Substrate Development program successfully. When our Talent Support team met her and discovered her passion to produce content and help others, Rise In hired her as a content and training intern.
• Inviting hiring ecosystem teams to developer training programs: Anil joined our Move on Sui bootcamp and met with the Embedr Finance team at one of our career workshops. He’s now a smart contract intern at the Embedr Finance team.
• IRL networking opportunities during developer training programs: Emrecan landed a job as Software Developer at a Solana ecosystem NFT project after getting involved in our Solana programs and meeting the team at Solana Istanbul HackerHouse.

👋We hope you enjoyed reading this report. We're working every day to improve the mostly unknown territory of developer onboarding into web3 and share our learnings. Get in touch with [email protected] if you'd like to be involved in this movement!