Over the last year, ETHGlobal hackathons have on-boarded thousands of developers to the ethereum community. The movement that started in October 2017 at ETHWaterloo has turned into something much larger, as local organizers all over the world stepped up to run incredible events in their own cities.

In the past year, 3,800 hackers from more than 65 countries built more than 500 projects. More than 1,000 of those hackers were new to ethereum. ETHGlobal events have become a heartbeat for the community: every few months, hundreds of us gather in a new place and #BUIDL.

And at every hackathon, there’s something new to do. After the ERC721 standard was popularized, we saw a wave of non-fungible token applications. After Aragon 0.5 was released, we saw teams start integrating it into their hacks. As the decentralized finance stack has grown, teams have been finding new and novel ways to combine these protocols and services in their applications.

ETHGlobal hackathons give us a way of measuring the progress being made by the ethereum developer community. They’re like the rings in a tree, marking an early moment in the growth of something much larger. Even compared to our first event at ETHWaterloo, today there are better tools, more mature protocols, and radically more options for developers looking to build on ethereum.

But most importantly, we built a community. Hackathons bring new developers into the ecosystem, introducing them to future co-founders or colleagues. They teach new skills, and help to “upgrade” the knowledge of everyone who attends. They connect local ethereum communities with people from all over the world, and cement the bonds that are the building blocks of a sustainable decentralized project.

They remind us that this community is built around building technology that solves problems — not speculating on price.

📣 🇫🇷 Announcing our 2019 season

Developer interest in ethereum hackathons shows no signs of slowing down.

In 2019 our goal is to double the number of new developers we on-board to the ethereum ecosystem, with a mix of returning events and hackathons in new cities and countries that have never before hosted major ethereum events.