Events

13 events · one settlement per chapter

  1. 2008-10-31A nine-page documentA document assembling public-key cryptography, digital signatures, proof of work and peer-to-peer networking into one complete system appeared on a mailing list.
  2. 2011The exchange was breached; the ledger kept producing blocksThe largest Bitcoin exchange of the day was broken into, while the Bitcoin network itself kept producing blocks, unaffected.
  3. 2016-07The DAO and the hard forkFunds were taken out of an on-chain investment organization's contract by the rules as written; the community then voted to roll the transfer back, and the ledger split in two.
  4. 2017Tokens everywhere, block space running outThe cost of issuing an asset fell to nearly zero and the number of tokens exploded; at the same time one on-chain game made block space scarce for the first time.
  5. 2018–2019The infrastructure built during the winterAcross two years of falling prices and quiet projects, the base components were built: the on-chain dollar, wallet custody, lending, automated swaps.
  6. 2022-11The exchange halted withdrawals; the protocols kept runningThe 2020 bet — write down what an exchange does as a program — was settled two years later by an exchange collapse.
  7. 2020Both sides of composabilityProtocols can call each other without permission; that same property let an attacker chain several protocols together inside a single transaction.
  8. 2021On-chain registration reaches culture; block space gets bought outOn-chain ownership records were adopted by auction houses, sports leagues and brands, while fees rose beyond what ordinary users could bear and demand spilled onto other chains.
  9. 2022-05UST breaks its peg and Terra failsA stablecoin that held its one-dollar peg through a mint-and-burn mechanism rather than reserves lost that peg; the token bound to it was hyperinflated, and the whole chain failed.
  10. 2022-05 至 2022-11From Terra to FTXThe hole in Terra travelled along credit exposure — first to a hedge fund, then to lending platforms and exchanges — and within six months several institutions had stopped operating.
  11. 2023Execution moves to a second layerTransactions execute on a second layer, which submits only the aggregate result to the main chain for settlement; the cost per transaction dropped by an order of magnitude.
  12. 2024-01-10Spot ETFs approvedThe United States approved spot bitcoin ETFs, and traditional finance could hold the asset at scale through channels it already used.
  13. 2025From asset to railStablecoins came to be used as payment rails, account abstraction lowered the barrier to use, and the people using it no longer needed to know what was underneath.