Ethereum's Public Website Doubled Non-English Traffic in 2022, Backed by 3,000 New Volunteer Translators
The Ethereum Foundation's open-source documentation hub grew significantly in 2022, reaching milestones in translation, community size, and educational content as the network completed its long-awaited shift away from energy-intensive mining.
The team behind ethereum.org published its 2022 year-in-review on January 18, 2023, documenting a year of sustained infrastructure buildout across the network's primary public-facing resource. The figures reflect a site that expanded its scope during the year, adding educational pathways and resources designed for users across language barriers and experience levels.
Translation Becomes a Primary Growth Driver
The most concrete expansion in 2022 came through the site's translation program. Exactly 3,000 new volunteer translators joined during the year, collectively producing 4.6 million translated words. The result was visible in traffic: non-English visits climbed to 28% of total site visits, twice the share recorded the year before. The Staking Launchpad, a tool that guides users through the process of locking ETH to participate in network validation, was made available in 20 languages.
The community around the site also grew. Ethereum.org's GitHub repository surpassed 1,000 total contributors for the first time, a milestone for an open-source project that relies on unpaid contributions for much of its upkeep. The site's Discord server reached 37,000 members, and its Crowdin translation workspace registered 7,000 participants.
The site added several new features in 2022, including eight interactive learning quizzes, a redesigned wallet finder with comparison tools, and a new "Learn Hub" educational pathway designed to guide newcomers through Ethereum's core concepts. The Learn Hub is directly relevant to the site's broader goal of extending its reach beyond the existing developer community.
Content Built Around a Pivotal Year for the Protocol
The site's editorial calendar tracked closely with Ethereum's technical roadmap. The most consequential event of 2022 was The Merge, completed on September 15, when the network's mainnet execution layer was combined with the Beacon Chain (Ethereum's proof-of-stake coordination layer, which launched in December 2020 and ran in parallel with the original proof-of-work network for nearly two years before the two were joined). This transition replaced proof-of-work consensus (the energy-intensive computational process used in Bitcoin and the original Ethereum) with proof-of-stake, in which validators lock up ETH as collateral rather than burning electricity to secure the network.
The energy impact was significant. According to data from Consensys, Ethereum's annualized electricity consumption fell from roughly 23 million MWh to approximately 2,600 MWh after The Merge, a reduction of about 99.95% to 99.98%. Carbon cost per transaction dropped from 109.71 kg of CO2 to approximately 0.01 kg. Ethereum.org published a dedicated energy consumption page timed to this transition.
At the time of The Merge, around 426,000 validators had staked approximately 14 million ETH, representing just over 11% of circulating supply. Post-Merge staking yields peaked at 8.1% annualized in September 2022, according to estimates from Gitnux. Concentration in the validator set was already a concern: Lido DAO controlled roughly 31% of staked ETH, and three centralized exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance) collectively accounted for an additional approximately 30 percentage points of staked ETH, according to Nansen data cited by CoinTelegraph.
The site also expanded coverage of Layer 2 networks, which are systems that process transactions off Ethereum's main chain to reduce costs for users. Arbitrum completed a major upgrade in 2022 that cut transaction fees by roughly half. Optimism launched a governance token via airdrop in June. Combined Layer 2 total value locked was approaching $4 billion by the end of the year, a figure that would grow to over $44 billion by early 2025.
The year also included Devcon VI, held in Bogotá, Colombia in October 2022. The conference drew more than 6,000 in-person attendees from 113 countries and attracted 60,000 livestream viewers. It was the first Devcon in three years, and its placement in Latin America reflected a deliberate effort to engage communities where Ethereum adoption has grown outside traditional technology hubs. The ethereum.org team was directly involved in supporting the event, making its omission from any summary of the year's work notable.
Regional Context: Where This Matters Most
The translation expansion carries direct relevance for users across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, two regions where Ethereum has significant on-chain footprints but where English-language documentation presents a practical barrier.
The Central, Southern Asia, and Oceania region was the third-largest crypto market globally in the July 2021 to June 2022 period, receiving $932 billion in crypto value. India alone accounted for $172 billion of that. NFT activity drove a notable share of engagement: NFT-related platforms accounted for 58% of crypto web traffic in the region in Q2 2022. Despite this activity, India imposed a 30% capital gains tax on crypto in April 2022 and a 1% Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) fee in July, contributing to a drop in its ranking on the Global Crypto Adoption Index from 2nd to 4th year-over-year.
Pakistan's regulatory environment presented a different kind of uncertainty during the same period. The country's central bank recommended a blanket cryptocurrency ban in January 2022, though the measure was not enacted. In markets where the legal status of digital assets remains unsettled, access to neutral, multilingual educational resources takes on added practical significance.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, $100.6 billion in on-chain crypto volume was recorded over the same period. Nigeria and Kenya were among the most active markets, with 35% of Nigerian adults identifying as crypto investors according to KuCoin survey data. The market profile in the region skews toward small transactions: 95% of all transfers were retail-sized and 80% were under $1,000. Peer-to-peer exchanges accounted for 6% of volume, more than double any other region globally, pointing to a user base accessing crypto primarily for remittances and currency preservation. Ethereum ranked as the second-most-used cryptocurrency across Africa in 2022.
"We see a lot of daily traders who are trading to make ends meet," one Nigeria-based blockchain consultant told Chainalysis in its 2022 Sub-Saharan Africa Geography Report. "Crypto to them is a rescue. It's a way to feed their family and solve their daily financial needs."
Foundation Spending and Infrastructure Work in 2022
The Ethereum Foundation spent approximately $105.4 million in 2022 across research, ecosystem grants, and community development. Across 2022 and 2023 combined, the broader Ethereum ecosystem deployed $497 million to fund projects, with the EF contributing roughly $240 million of that total.
The ethereum.org team also extended its work to adjacent infrastructure during 2022, including, among other projects, the Ecosystem Support Program website, Geth client documentation, Ethereum Foundation blog internationalization, Staking Launchpad updates, and the frontend for the KZG ceremony. The KZG ceremony is a cryptographic setup process associated with EIP-4844, also referred to as proto-danksharding, a protocol upgrade specifically designed to reduce transaction costs on Layer 2 networks by enabling more efficient data availability on the base chain.
Looking Ahead
With the protocol's consensus mechanism now settled and Layer 2 adoption accelerating, analysts and observers broadly expect the site's continued development to focus on making that technical progress legible to users arriving from outside the existing developer community. Whether that trajectory holds will depend on how the ethereum.org team sets its priorities in the years following 2022.