World’s Largest Ethereum Hackathon to be Held in Canada With Vitalik Buterin

ETHWaterloo is set to host the world’s largest Ethereum Hackathon in October dedicated to the development of innovative decentralized applications (Dapps).

During a 36-hour hackathon lasting from October 13 to 15, developers will collaborate with the co-founders and inventors of Ethereum. Some of the most influential figures within the Ethereum industry and community including Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, William Mougayar, Joey Krug, Stephan Tual and Jeff Coleman will participate as speakers, mentors and judges to assist developers in creating efficient, secure and practical smart contracts-based applications using the Ethereum blockchain.

“This fall, developers across the world will come to Waterloo, Canada to build decentralized applications at the World's Largest Ethereum Hackathon. ETHWaterloo will give ambitious and talented developers the opportunity to work alongside the inventors of Ethereum for a 36-hour hackathon,” said the ETHWaterloo team.

According to the official announcement of ETHWaterloo, the hackathon is being hosted in the Canadian city of Waterloo where Buterin dropped out from the University of Waterloo to create the Ethereum blockchain network. The hackathon will take place at the Center for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo and over 60 development teams have been invited to compete at the event.

More to that, the ETHWaterloo team explained that it believes Ethereum is at a critical point in terms of development and growth. It has experienced a spectacular growth over the past few years but as noted by many experts including Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, Ethereum needs to scale proportionally and one of the solutions that the Ethereum foundation and development team is actively developing is the proof of stake consensus protocol.

“Despite this incredible growth, however, the network is still in dire need of more engineers building its core infrastructure; researchers progressing its solutions to things like proof of stake, state channels, and sharding; and developers creating useful real world applications on top of it,” said the ETHWaterloo team.

Earlier this month, JP Vergne, a professor at Ivey Business School, emphasized that developer activity around the blockchain network is the best method of evaluating its value.

"We found that the best predictor of a cryptocurrency's exchange rate is the amount of developer activity around it,” said Vergne.

Hackathons such as ETHWaterloo aim to facilitate the development of innovative decentralized applications but also find talens and developers that could contribute to the development and scaling of the main Ethereum protocol that is being utilized by some of the world’s largest multi-billion dollar companies including Microsoft, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

At the time of reporting, ETHWaterloo has not revealed rewards and incentives for winning development team. Winning development teams will likely receive funding to pursue the development of their decentralized applications and will be welcomed to work with the Ethereum development team to scale the network and focus on implementing important technologies such as the proof of stake consensus protocol.