2018 has been a rocky year for Ethereum. The virtual currency’s price crossed $1400 in January, and it bottomed below $170 in September. Despite the significant price plunge, Ethereum continues to remain popular among developers, as it can be witnessed from the participation drawn by a hackathon in San Francisco.

It was revealed that 1,000 developers were hacking Ethereum at the ongoing hackathon in San Francisco. The Palace of Fine Arts in the city housed 1,000 developers from October 5 to October 7. The event is a part of a new movement that began earlier this year to expand the very successful ETH Waterloo hackathon across various regions.

ETH San Francisco from ETHGlobal

The ETH San Francisco “is an opportunity to work alongside the developers, industry experts, advisers, and companies who are making the infrastructure and applications that will power the new decentralized web,” as stated on its website.

The hackathon is a part of the initiative by ETHGlobal whose aim is to foster a world-class ecosystem of Ethereum developers and entrepreneurs, who are collectively building the Web 3 world. ETHGlobal offers assistance and expertise to regional hackathons in different geographies across the world, apart from hosting a major hackathon every year. Previously, they have hosted ETH Waterloo, ETH Denver, ETH Buenos Aires, ETH India and ETH Berlin.

Among the hackathon’s judges and speakers were Ethereum Foundation’s Chief Scientist Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase’s CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Paradigm’s VC Fred Ehrsam, Scalar Capital’s VC Linda Xie, ConsenSys’ Storyteller Simon de la Rouviere, Ox Project’s co-founder Will Warren, Parity’s Co-founder Bjorn Wagner and Augur’s Co-founder Joey Krug.

Maker Dao, NuCypher, RCN Global lending, Celer, ZK Capital, Liquidity Network, Ox Project, Skale Labs, Brave, Bloqboard, Augur, Chainlink, Connext, ConsenSys, Blockchain Capital, Harbor, Dharma, the graph, Set protocol, Kyber network, Adex network, Clearmatics, Quantstamp and Shyft were among the sponsors of the event.

Developers supporting Ethereum despite price decline

2018 has been a turbulent year for Ethereum, which, after attaining its all-time high of $1417 in January, to a low of $169 in September. The cause of the price decline has been attributed to the massive selling pressure placed upon Ethereum by ICOs. According to Biswa Das, a founding partner at crypto hedge fund Bloomwater Capital, projects have been selling Ethereum to manage operational expenses and because of the fear that the market will continue to plunge.

Developers, however, have been supporting Ethereum actively. According to a popular independent vlogger, Ethereum network is growing at an unprecedented rate. He stated that the number of users downloading ETH developer program Truffle were more much more in June than in January when ETH price had peaked. In his vlog, he also said that the app was seeing 50,000 downloads per month, using a ConsenSys article as a reference. If the Ethereum network continued to add developers at this rate, it would have an additional half a million developers working on it by the end of 2018.