# A New Wave of Builders Is Coming to Ethereum: Here's Why | Sophia Dew - Ethereum Foundation

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2026-03-09
- Duration: 11:59
- Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-GS-0YIqtH3k
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS-0YIqtH3k

## Description

🚀 Get Ready for ETHDenver 2026! 🚀

We're already hard at work preparing for next year's biggest Web3 event!

Keep your eyes peeled for more info on ETHDenver 2026—it’s going to be epic! 🌟

## Transcript

[music] All right. So, next up we have Sophia Doo who is on our DevTact team at the EF and she's going to be talking about the new demographic of builders and how Ethereum will win them. Let's give her a welcome. >> Thank you. Welcome. Hello. Emily did a great introduction, but I am Sophia. I'm new to the developer acceleration team at Ethereum Foundation and today I'll be talking about the new demographic of builders and how Ethereum will uniquely win them. So everyone in this room already knows AI is completely changing how software gets built. What's maybe less understood is the new wave of people who now identify as a builder. this is becoming a younger and younger generation and the scale that this is happening in. So there's a big Gen Z cultural shift towards entrepreneurship. Recently the World Economic Forum analyzes in Gen Z that the workforce highlights values like side hustles, access over ownership, technative work styles. Um, if you ask a lot of Gen Z people or maybe if you have your own anecdotal experience, you'll see that the traditional nine-to-five isn't as common. It's a few for macro factors for genuual genuine uh job sentiment and opportunities and careers are going down, but also the actual values that Gen Z cares about is very much aligned with what this industry and what Ethereum makes possible uniquely based off our technology. So, a a lot that you're seeing as common themes here is leverage and access to actually own your opportunities, own how you make money, own um own your leverage. And that's what is unique to our industry. This new generation is also becoming founders. In 2022, the medium age of a YC founder was 30. And just 2 years later in 2024, that medium age is now 24. and the number of YC accepted founders between 18 and 22 increased over 110% in the last year. Um, additionally, LinkedIn founder start saw that there was a 300% increase and people who had founder in their bio on LinkedIn. So you're seeing this huge trend where more young people are actually going towards entrepreneurship uh straight out of college or even leaving college to go and jump and start being an entrepreneur. At the same time we're simultaneously seeing a huge growth in developer tools and adoption of developer tools amongst these young builders. So young builders are adopting new developer tools at a massive scale. Recently, the Netlefi CEO said uh that he projected his total addressable builder market was around 17 million professional JavaScript developers prior to AI. And in the last year, he now says his TAM is 3 billion. This is an insane scale this is happening. And to make it more concrete, every day, a few months ago, the daily average sign up rate, this is not users, this is not daily active users, it's new users, people who are signing up on Netlefi, was 3,000. And now, if you look at their numbers, it's 16,000 daily signups. These are new users who are setting up setting up websites and using Netlifi as their hosting website um that are coming on every day. So you're seeing this huge adoption of new people using this tool and a lot of those new people experimenting with developer tools are young Gen Z builders. One of the good news is that the dev tool stack is a very saturated space but it's not settled. So there is more developer tools that are popping up out of nowhere and young people are some of the most excited to actually test out new developer tools because they're always excited to try to figure out how they can identify leverage or how they can identify what's the new thing and what's new and coming cutting edge. They didn't grow up with a decade of learning a single programming language sticking to a specific tech stack. They are either in high school, sometimes middle school. I've seen a few middle schoolers in some of the hackathons I've been to lately who are just excited to test out any of the new tools. And there's a surge of new tools that are not just geared towards developers. These are also geared towards non-traditional builders. So, a designer who wants to code something or maybe um a business person or a storyteller. So, they're developer tools geared towards people who maybe wouldn't traditionally see themselves as a developer. uh in Crunchbas's 2025 report, they said that developer tools were one of the few sectors where funding is growing year overyear consistently. So we're seeing this as a place where investors have a lot of conviction as that this is a growing market and YC in the latest batch in 2025 alone had 94 developer tool companies. These are companies who are have developer tools looking for builders to use them. So all of this is fairly new. This is all happening just within 2025 alone. And it's really really taking off this past year. And it's ex it's going to accelerate a ton as we get into 2026. And what's a super huge opportunity is that these young builders haven't even formed opinions about what tools or technologies they're using to build. So, they're not like cryptonative necessarily, but they're also not cryptognostic. They don't really have opinions yet about what tooling is or is good or bad or what they want to use or what they don't want to use. They don't have strong opinions yet about Ethereum and whether they should use it. And so, there is this short window of opportunity happening right now. And the Ethereum ecosystem is in a perfect position where our whole ecosystem, our values, our technology can meet them right where they are and be their first real experience of what it means to build technology and shape it collectively together. All right, so this is just explaining the highle meta of what is actually happening, what are the opportunities, why this is such an exciting time. But none of this matters unless we have an actual strategy at how do we win them? How do we win these young builders who are coming in swarms at a massive massive scale put together this two-pronged approach. There's the bottoms up and the tops down. So at a bottom up level, we want to go straight to where they already are. So identify what are the top tools, platforms, communities that they're already uh going towards. And so we show up where they already are at the tool layer and we inject Ethereum Ethereum specific knowledge into these opportunities into these tools. Additionally go at the top down uh signal that opportunity all the opportunities that are at the business layer. All right. So what does this actually mean in practice? Right now, a lot of these builders are using certain tools like cursor, replet, claude code, different agent frameworks. You've probably heard of OpenClaw that's taken up uh this storm on Twitter and gotten a lot of popularity. And so, one of the specific ways that we can ensure that we're there is to actually show up in those environments at the start that they're starting to build. So ETH skills is something that Austin Griffith the lead of the builder growth team is creating and it has actually injected context and skills that you can give to agent frameworks any LLM to so it knows how to build on Ethereum. These E skills we can make it really clear into a PR. So any of these uh developer tools, we can find their developer tools, especially the ones that are open source, make a PR. So when agent frameworks inject and say, "Hey, here are the skills that we offer you on addition, eskills automatically shows up." So this is not people finding out about eklls just from our Twitter or us talking about it. It's people finding out about it through the GitHubs, through the tools that they're already using. And as they're installing those tools and as they're learning about those tools, ES skills just naturally pops up or tools to build on Ethereum naturally pops up as part of their existing onboarding flow into the other developer tools. The other strategy is the topdown strategy. Here's where we really want to signal credibility, signal that there's opportunities here. And the way we do that is through partnerships with universities, accelerators, VCs, uh, and tech and media outlets. The goal here is people who have already spent decades and maybe even centuries establishing that trust and credibility all we meet them where they already are and show them the opportunities of Ethereum and get them to also signal to their builders and people who already trust them uh, about the opportunities on Ethereum. So, one of the ways that we're doing this specifically is through the synthesis. The synthesis is this online builder and cultural experiment that's a shelling point between builders, partners, tools inside and outside of the industry. And our goal here is to really gather up the attention, the momentum of this cultural shift that's happening amongst AI agents and bring all of that energy onto Ethereum. So, how can we use that as a way to partner with different institutions, uh, people who have these like credibility nodes and who haven't brought Ethereum into their orbit quite yet, but partner directly with them so and to signal that Ethereum is a great opportunity. All right. Uh, I can't stress this enough. This is not something that we need to do within the next like year or two years or five years. The time is now. the opportunity to shape uh what where builders start building is this very limited window. It's literally like this week and next week we are at an urgent time to actually shape how builders think about their technology. There's a new younger generation of builders that are coming but the scale is absolutely massive there. It is um unprecedented just the scale that new builders are starting to become founders, experiment with different tools and the most of the people who are experimenting with all these new developer tools are the young generation and they are still right now forming opinions on what technology to use. These minds are very malleable. They're they're open to changing. They h they don't have decades uh of building in one direction versus another. And so there is an opportunity here where we can actually shape their opinions about technology. Ethereum is the largest developer ecosystem. It's no secret we're here at ETH Denver. Many of us have bumped into each other at other conferences and developer conferences before. Many of us have interacted on Discords and forums and post with each other. We're a giant global ecosystem and our power is super super powerful. And so, how do we leverage our collective momentum, break out of our silo and pull new all of these young builders in and to build with us? The opportunity to capture this momentum and this new builder wave is now. And I am so excited that we all get to collectively contribute to this together. So, thank you [applause]