On 16 October 2026, the trustee of Mt. Gox pushed the deadline for repaying the exchange’s creditors back by one more year, to 31 October 2027. It was the fourth one-year delay. Mt. Gox stopped trading in February 2014, so people who lost bitcoin there have now waited more than twelve years for part of it. In crypto, an event that looks closed can still be costing people money a decade later.
This lesson lays out the history of cryptocurrency as a timeline. It starts on 3 January 2009 with a single block that carried a newspaper headline, and it reaches October 2026, when bitcoin funds trade on US stock exchanges, a federal stablecoin law is being turned into rules, and every crypto firm serving clients in the European Union needs a licence. In between come a pizza, a collapsed exchange, a hacked fund, a token-sale boom and several price records, each followed by a deep fall.
Read it as a chain of tests. Almost every era brought a new idea (digital cash, programmable contracts, token sales, lending without banks, ownership of digital items, funds on a stock exchange) and then a failure that showed where the idea broke. The failure usually produced the next rule or the next piece of technology. Near the end, every milestone sits in one dated table.
If you come from the previous lesson, the three pillars of a blockchain, you already know what a block, a network and a consensus rule are. Here you see them at work, and fail, in real events. Facts and dates are as of October 2026. Prices appear only with the date they refer to, and nothing here is investment advice.
2008 to 2010: a white paper, a newspaper headline and two pizzas
The story begins with a nine-page document. On 31 October 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a link to a cryptography mailing list: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. Its abstract describes online payments sent “without going through a financial institution”. Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym. Who wrote the paper, one person or several, is still unknown in October 2026, and this lesson does not guess.
The paper solved a problem earlier digital cash projects had not: how strangers who do not trust each other can agree on one list of payments without a central bank or company keeping it. Our guide what Bitcoin is and how it works explains the mechanism.
The network started on 3 January 2009. The first block, called the genesis block or block 0, carries the time stamp 18:15:05 UTC. Inside it, Satoshi placed a line of text that anyone can still read on a block explorer: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. It is a headline from that day’s edition of The Times of London. Satoshi never explained the choice. It is often read as a jab at bank rescues, but the one thing it proves is that the block cannot have been created before that day.
The block paid a reward of 50 bitcoins. Six days later, on 9 January 2009, the first version of the open-source software was released, so that anyone could run a node and mine.
One of the first people to do so was Hal Finney, a cryptographer. On 12 January 2009 (UTC), block 170 recorded the first transaction between two people: Satoshi sent him 10 bitcoins. There was no market and no price. Bitcoin was an experiment shared by a few dozen enthusiasts.
More than a year later came the first widely reported purchase of physical goods. On 18 May 2010, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz offered on the bitcointalk forum to pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas. On 22 May 2010 he reported on the same thread that the trade had been done: another forum user, jercos, had ordered two Papa John’s pizzas for him and received the coins. The bitcoins were worth a few dozen dollars at the time. The date is now celebrated every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day, and the trade is the most quoted example of how far the coin’s dollar value moved later.
2011 to 2014: Mt. Gox shows where the weak point is
Bitcoin’s network itself kept running. The trouble came from the places where people bought and stored their coins.
Mt. Gox was the clearest case. Jed McCaleb launched it as a bitcoin exchange in July 2010 and sold it to Mark Karpeles in March 2011. In June 2011 a hacker used a compromised account to dump a large amount of bitcoin, and the price on the exchange briefly collapsed. Mt. Gox recovered and kept growing: by 2013 it handled about 70% of all bitcoin trades worldwide, according to CoinDesk.
In early February 2014, Mt. Gox paused withdrawals and blamed a technical problem. It halted trading on 24 February, its website went dark on 25 February, and on 28 February 2014 it filed for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo. The company could not account for 744,408 bitcoins belonging to customers and 100,000 of its own, roughly 850,000 in total. It later found about 200,000 bitcoins in an old-format wallet, which brought the loss down to about 650,000. In April 2014 the Tokyo court moved the case to bankruptcy liquidation.
For the US reader, 2014 also brought the first tax rule. On 25 March 2014 the IRS published Notice 2014-21, which treats virtual currency as property for federal tax purposes. That decision is why each sale or swap of a coin can be a taxable event in the United States.
Repayment has been slow. Creditors approved a plan in November 2021, and payouts in bitcoin and bitcoin cash began in July 2024 through exchanges such as Kraken and Bitstamp. In a notice of 27 March 2025, the trustee said more than 19,500 creditors had been repaid. Then came the fourth delay, in a trustee notice of 16 October 2026, to 31 October 2027, as Coindaro reported. As of October 2026 the trustee has not published a total amount repaid.
The lesson from Mt. Gox is the one every later collapse repeated: when an exchange holds your coins, you hold a promise from the exchange, not the coins. Our guide to crypto wallets and who holds the keys explains the difference between a custodial account and self-custody.
2015 to 2016: Ethereum makes blockchains programmable, and The DAO tests the idea
Bitcoin’s first halving had already happened on 28 November 2012, at block 210,000, cutting the mining reward from 50 to 25 bitcoins. The second came on 9 July 2016 at block 420,000. These cuts every 210,000 blocks are written into the code, and each one halves the flow of new coins.
The bigger change of these years came from a different network. Vitalik Buterin described Ethereum in a white paper in late 2013, and the project raised funds in a token sale in 2014. Its first live version, called Frontier, went live on 30 July 2015 at 15:26:13 UTC, according to ethereum.org. Ethereum added something Bitcoin had kept simple on purpose: programs, called smart contracts, that run on the blockchain and hold money according to their own rules. Our guide what is Ethereum covers how it works.
Ethereum’s first large test was The DAO, an investment fund run by code and token votes. Its sale ran for 28 days, from 30 April to 28 May 2016. According to the SEC’s later report, it sold about 1.15 billion DAO tokens for about 12 million ether, worth about $150 million at the time.
On 17 June 2016, an attacker used a flaw in the fund’s code to move about 3.6 million ether, around $50 million at the time, into a separate contract. The Ethereum community then argued over a question that still divides crypto: should a blockchain ever rewrite its own history to undo a loss? The majority said yes. A hard fork on 20 July 2016, at block 1,920,000, returned the funds to a contract from which DAO investors could reclaim their ether. A minority kept running the unchanged chain, which continues today as Ethereum Classic.
2017: token sales, a $19,783 record and the first answers from regulators
Ethereum made it cheap to create a token, and in 2017 thousands of projects did. In an initial coin offering (ICO), a team sold new tokens directly to the public, usually for ether or bitcoin, often with little more than a white paper. Crunchbase estimated that ICOs raised about $4.9 billion over the year; tallies differ by method, and some put the total slightly higher.
Regulators answered within months. On 25 July 2017, the SEC published its report of investigation on The DAO. It concluded that DAO tokens were securities, so their sale should have been registered unless an exemption applied. The SEC did not bring charges in that report; it used it to warn that US securities law can apply to tokens, whatever technology issues them. In December 2017 it said the same of a token sale by Munchee, a restaurant review app.
China went further. On 4 September 2017, seven Chinese regulators banned ICOs outright.
Meanwhile the price of bitcoin climbed. On 17 December 2017 the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index peaked at $19,783.21, a record at the time, CoinDesk reported; prices differed slightly from one exchange to another. The same month, bitcoin entered regulated US markets. Cboe Futures Exchange started trading bitcoin futures at 5 p.m. Chicago time on Sunday 10 December 2017, according to Cboe’s launch notice. CME Group followed with its own contract, which opened on the evening of Sunday 17 December for the trading day of 18 December, as law firm Dechert noted. Both contracts settle in cash and sit under the oversight of the CFTC.
The top did not hold. Within days the price had dropped about 30%, and on 7 December 2018 it fell to $3,306, CoinDesk reported, more than 80% under the 2017 peak. Many 2017 tokens lost almost all of their value or disappeared. The ICO years left a pattern you will meet again: projects that promise returns, raise money quickly and give buyers no rights. Our guide on how to avoid crypto scams lists the warning signs that came out of that period.
2020 to 2021: DeFi Summer, a $69.3 million NFT and the first bitcoin country
The third bitcoin halving took place on 11 May 2020, at block 630,000, cutting the reward from 12.5 to 6.25 bitcoins.
A month later, a lending protocol changed how people used Ethereum. On 15 June 2020, Compound began handing out its COMP governance token to the people who lent and borrowed on it, The Block reported, at a pace of about 2,880 COMP a day. Users rushed in to collect the token, a practice soon called yield farming, and other protocols copied the model. The months that followed are remembered as DeFi Summer: decentralised finance, lending and trading run by smart contracts with no bank in the middle. Our guide DeFi explained covers how these protocols work and what can go wrong.
For UK readers, 2021 started with a restriction. From 6 January 2021, the FCA banned the sale of crypto derivatives such as futures, options and exchange-traded notes to retail consumers. Buying the coins themselves stayed legal.
Then came the NFT year. A non-fungible token is a unique token that records who owns a specific digital item. On 11 March 2021, Christie’s sold a digital collage by the artist Beeple, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, for $69,346,250, as Al Jazeera reported that day. Bidding had opened at $100. Al Jazeera described Beeple as the first artist to sell a purely digital piece at auction, and the sale put NFTs on front pages around the world.
A country joined in the same year. El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly passed a Bitcoin Law in June 2021, and bitcoin became legal tender there on 7 September 2021, the first country to take that step. The experiment was partly undone later: on 29 January 2025, under a $1.4 billion programme with the IMF, the Assembly voted 55 to 2 to make accepting bitcoin voluntary for businesses, Cointelegraph reported, citing Reuters. Bitcoin kept its status as legal tender on paper.
Prices peaked again in the autumn. On 10 November 2021, bitcoin rose past its previous record of $68,564 and ether reached a record $4,868, Cointelegraph reported that day. Depending on the data provider, bitcoin’s 2021 peak sits between about $68,600 and $69,000.
2022: Terra, The Merge and FTX, the year trust broke
The fall started with interest rates. On 4 May 2022 the US Federal Reserve raised its key rate by half a point, to a range of 0.75% to 1%, and said more increases would follow. The cheap money that had fed 2021 was drying up.
On 9 May 2022, TerraUSD (UST), a dollar stablecoin that relied on an algorithm and its sister token LUNA rather than on cash reserves, began to lose its peg. Within days UST traded far below $1, LUNA was worth almost nothing and the Terra blockchain was halted. Decrypt puts the value lost in the collapse of UST and LUNA at about $40 billion. Lending firms that had placed customer money in risky bets followed: Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York on 13 July 2022.
In the middle of the crisis, Ethereum completed an upgrade it had been preparing for years. The Merge, on 15 September 2022 at 06:42:42 UTC (block 15,537,394), moved the network from proof of work, where miners compete with computing power, to proof of stake, where validators lock up ether as a deposit. According to ethereum.org, the change cut Ethereum’s energy use by about 99.95%.
Two months later came FTX. On 11 November 2022, after its own token FTT crashed and customers rushed to withdraw, the exchange and more than 130 affiliated companies, including the trading firm Alameda Research, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware. Its founder Sam Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive and John J. Ray III, who had overseen the liquidation of Enron, took over.
The court cases took years. Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on 12 December 2022. A jury in Manhattan convicted him on all seven counts on 2 November 2023: two of wire fraud and five of conspiracy, including conspiracy to commit money laundering. On 28 March 2024 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and to forfeit more than $11 billion, according to the Justice Department. The Second Circuit court of appeals upheld the conviction on 12 June 2026, and on 10 September 2026 his lawyers asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. As of October 2026 the Court has not said whether it will.
Terra’s founder Do Kwon was arrested in Montenegro on 23 March 2023, extradited to the United States, and pleaded guilty to fraud charges in August 2025. On 11 December 2025, a federal judge in New York sentenced him to 15 years, more than the 12 years prosecutors had asked for.
2024: bitcoin funds on Wall Street and the EU’s rulebook
The year opened with the change many had expected for a decade. On 10 January 2024, the SEC approved the listing of exchange-traded products holding bitcoin itself, and they began trading on US exchanges the next day. The SEC had turned down more than 20 such filings from 2018 to March 2023, and a court had found that it had not explained its rejection of Grayscale’s request well enough. “Circumstances, however, have changed,” SEC chair Gary Gensler wrote in his statement of 10 January 2024.
The new funds brought fresh demand. On 13 March 2024 Ethereum activated its Dencun upgrade, which cut the cost of storing data for the networks built on top of it, and the next day bitcoin touched a record of $73,798, according to CoinDesk. The fourth halving followed on 20 April 2024, at block 840,000, cutting the reward from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoins.
Ether followed bitcoin into the stock market. The SEC approved the exchange rule changes for spot ether funds on 23 May 2024, and they began trading on 23 July 2024.
In Europe, the year belonged to MiCA, the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. It entered into force on 29 June 2023 and applied in two steps. The rules for stablecoins (asset-referenced and e-money tokens) took effect on 30 June 2024. The rest, including licences for crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) such as exchanges and custodians, followed on 30 December 2024, with a transition period for firms already registered under national rules, such as the PSAN register of the AMF in France or the OAM register in Italy. Our guide MiCA regulation explained goes through what the law requires.
In July 2024, Mt. Gox creditors finally started to receive coins. And in the early hours of 5 December 2024 (UTC), bitcoin went above $100,000 for the first time, Cointelegraph reported, then touched $104,000 at 03:08 UTC.
2025: a bitcoin reserve, a stablecoin law and the largest theft on record
On 21 February 2025, hackers took about $1.5 billion in ether and related tokens from Bybit, one of the largest crypto exchanges. No larger theft of crypto had been reported before it. In a public notice of 26 February 2025, the FBI attributed the theft to North Korea, to a group it calls TraderTraitor. Bybit said the attacker had manipulated a routine transfer from one of its cold wallets.
On 6 March 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14233, which created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate stockpile for other digital assets. The reserve is filled with bitcoin the Treasury already holds after criminal or civil forfeiture. The order did not have the government buy bitcoin on the market.
Ethereum activated its Pectra upgrade on 7 May 2025. On 20 June 2025, Coinbase announced its MiCA licence from Luxembourg’s regulator, the CSSF, which lets it serve clients in all 27 EU countries.
On 18 July 2025, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, the first federal US law for payment stablecoins. The Senate had passed it 68 to 30 on 17 June and the House 308 to 122 on 17 July. It requires stablecoins to be backed one for one by dollars or similar liquid assets. On 17 July 2025, the same day, the House also passed the CLARITY Act, a bill to split oversight of crypto markets between the SEC and the CFTC, by 294 to 134.
On 17 September 2025, the SEC approved generic listing standards that let Nasdaq, Cboe and NYSE Arca list funds holding spot commodities, digital assets included, without filing a separate rule change for each one.
Bitcoin set its current record in early October. On Sunday 5 October 2025, Reuters reported that bitcoin had hit an all-time high and traded at $125,245.57 at 05:12 GMT (syndicated copy). As of October 2026 that record has not been beaten. Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade went live on 3 December 2025, and Do Kwon was sentenced on 11 December.
2026 so far: from writing rules to enforcing them
This section is the one most likely to change, and it is current as of October 2026.
In the United States, the SEC and the CFTC issued a joint interpretation on 17 March 2026 that sorts crypto assets into five groups: digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins and digital securities. Only the last group is treated as securities. The text appeared in the Federal Register on 23 March. The SEC’s proposed Regulation Crypto Assets appeared in the Federal Register on 21 August 2026, and its comment period closed on 20 October. On 1 October 2026 the SEC also proposed rules on how investment advisers and funds can hold crypto for clients.
The GENIUS Act gave regulators until 18 July 2026 to write its rules, and they missed that date. The first final rule came from the OCC, the regulator of national banks, on 21 October 2026. Comptroller Jonathan Gould called it “a clear, practical framework for payment stablecoin innovation”; it takes effect on 18 January 2027.
The broader market-structure bill has not passed. On 15 September 2026, the Senate failed by 49 votes to 50 to open debate on the CLARITY Act, short of the 60 votes needed, law firm Orrick noted. Our report on US crypto rules after the CLARITY vote explains what the agencies can do without a new law. The US midterm elections on 3 November 2026 will decide who takes up the bill next.
In Europe, MiCA’s transition period ended across the EU on 1 July 2026. In a statement of 17 April 2026, the markets authority ESMA warned that firms serving EU clients without a licence after that date “will be in breach of EU law and must cease offering such services”. On 8 October 2026, ESMA added that licensed firms should stop offering services in stablecoins that do not comply with MiCA and clear clients’ existing positions within three months, so by about 8 January 2027.
Technology kept moving too. Solana switched on its Alpenglow consensus upgrade at about 13:54 UTC on 21 October 2026, at slot 459,653,000, Solana Compass reported. Ethereum’s next upgrade, Glamsterdam, went live on the Sepolia test network on 6 October 2026, as scheduled by the Ethereum Foundation; as of October 2026 no mainnet date has been set.
And bitcoin? It traded near $82,100 at 07:59 UTC on 16 October 2026, according to a Coindaro market snapshot, about a third below the level Reuters reported at the October 2025 record, by our own calculation. Prices change by the minute; the live figure belongs on a price page, not in a history lesson.
History of cryptocurrency timeline: every milestone in one table
The table below lists the milestones of this lesson in order, as of October 2026. Prices are those reported by the source named in the text for that date; other data providers show slightly different figures.
| Date | Milestone | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Oct 2008 | Bitcoin white paper posted to a cryptography mailing list | Describes payments without a financial institution |
| 3 Jan 2009 | Genesis block, 18:15:05 UTC, with a Times headline inside | The Bitcoin blockchain starts |
| 9 Jan 2009 | First open-source Bitcoin software released | Anyone can run a node and mine |
| 12 Jan 2009 | Block 170: Satoshi sends 10 BTC to Hal Finney | First transaction between two people |
| 22 May 2010 | Laszlo Hanyecz reports paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas | First widely reported purchase of goods |
| Jun 2011 | Mt. Gox account hacked; price briefly collapses on the exchange | First big exchange security failure |
| 28 Nov 2012 | First halving, block 210,000 (50 to 25 BTC) | New supply cut on schedule |
| 2013 | Mt. Gox handles about 70% of bitcoin trades | One company at the centre of the market |
| 28 Feb 2014 | Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo | About 850,000 BTC reported missing |
| 25 Mar 2014 | IRS Notice 2014-21: virtual currency is property | Basis of US crypto taxation |
| 30 Jul 2015 | Ethereum Frontier goes live, 15:26:13 UTC | Smart contracts on a public blockchain |
| 17 Jun 2016 | The DAO attack moves about 3.6 million ETH | First large smart-contract exploit |
| 9 Jul 2016 | Second halving, block 420,000 (25 to 12.5 BTC) | New supply cut on schedule |
| 20 Jul 2016 | Ethereum hard fork at block 1,920,000 | Ethereum Classic continues the old chain |
| 25 Jul 2017 | SEC report: DAO tokens were securities | US securities law can apply to tokens |
| 4 Sep 2017 | China bans ICOs | First outright ban of token sales |
| 10 Dec 2017 | Cboe bitcoin futures start trading, 5 p.m. Chicago time | Bitcoin enters regulated US markets |
| 17 Dec 2017 | CoinDesk index peaks at $19,783.21; CME futures open that evening | Peak of the 2017 boom |
| 7 Dec 2018 | Bitcoin falls to $3,306 | More than 80% below the 2017 peak |
| 11 May 2020 | Third halving, block 630,000 (12.5 to 6.25 BTC) | New supply cut on schedule |
| 15 Jun 2020 | Compound starts distributing COMP | Start of DeFi Summer |
| 6 Jan 2021 | FCA ban on crypto derivatives for UK retail clients | UK limits leveraged products |
| 11 Mar 2021 | Beeple NFT sells at Christie’s for $69,346,250 | NFTs reach the mainstream |
| 7 Sep 2021 | Bitcoin becomes legal tender in El Salvador | First country to adopt bitcoin |
| 10 Nov 2021 | Bitcoin passes $68,564, ether reaches $4,868 | Peak of the 2021 cycle |
| 9 May 2022 | TerraUSD starts to lose its peg, LUNA collapses | About $40 billion lost |
| 13 Jul 2022 | Celsius files for Chapter 11 | Crypto lenders fail |
| 15 Sep 2022 | The Merge, 06:42:42 UTC | Ethereum moves to proof of stake |
| 11 Nov 2022 | FTX files for Chapter 11 in Delaware | Collapse of a top exchange |
| 2 Nov 2023 | Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on seven counts | Fraud verdict for FTX’s founder |
| 10-11 Jan 2024 | SEC approves spot bitcoin ETPs; trading starts | Bitcoin funds on US exchanges |
| 13 Mar 2024 | Ethereum Dencun upgrade | Cheaper data for networks built on Ethereum |
| 14 Mar 2024 | Bitcoin record of $73,798 (CoinDesk) | Record driven by the new funds |
| 28 Mar 2024 | Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years | End of the FTX trial |
| 20 Apr 2024 | Fourth halving, block 840,000 (6.25 to 3.125 BTC) | New supply cut on schedule |
| 23 May / 23 Jul 2024 | Spot ether ETFs approved, then start trading | Ether joins bitcoin on Wall Street |
| 30 Jun 2024 | MiCA rules for stablecoins apply in the EU | First EU-wide stablecoin rules |
| Jul 2024 | Mt. Gox repayments begin | Ten years after the collapse |
| 5 Dec 2024 | Bitcoin above $100,000 for the first time | New record |
| 30 Dec 2024 | MiCA rules for crypto service providers apply | EU licence regime starts |
| 29 Jan 2025 | El Salvador makes bitcoin acceptance voluntary (55 votes to 2) | Legal tender experiment scaled back |
| 21 Feb 2025 | Bybit hack, about $1.5 billion | FBI blames North Korea |
| 6 Mar 2025 | Executive Order 14233 creates the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve | US government keeps forfeited bitcoin |
| 7 May 2025 | Ethereum Pectra upgrade | Network upgrade |
| 20 Jun 2025 | Coinbase announces its MiCA licence from Luxembourg | One licence for all 27 EU countries |
| 18 Jul 2025 | GENIUS Act signed | First US federal stablecoin law |
| 17 Sep 2025 | SEC approves generic listing standards for crypto ETPs | Faster route for new crypto funds |
| 5 Oct 2025 | Bitcoin record; $125,245.57 at 05:12 GMT (Reuters) | Highest level as of October 2026 |
| 3 Dec 2025 | Ethereum Fusaka upgrade | Network upgrade |
| 11 Dec 2025 | Do Kwon sentenced to 15 years | Terra case closes in court |
| 17 Mar 2026 | SEC and CFTC joint interpretation of crypto assets | Five categories of tokens |
| 17 Apr 2026 | ESMA statement on the end of MiCA transition | Unlicensed firms must stop |
| 12 Jun 2026 | Second Circuit upholds Bankman-Fried’s conviction | Appeal rejected |
| 1 Jul 2026 | MiCA transition period ends in every EU state | Licence required everywhere in the EU |
| 21 Aug 2026 | SEC’s Regulation Crypto Assets published for comment | Proposed rules for token offerings |
| 10 Sep 2026 | Bankman-Fried asks the Supreme Court to hear his case | Last appeal route |
| 15 Sep 2026 | Senate fails to advance the CLARITY Act (49-50) | US market-structure law still missing |
| 1 Oct 2026 | SEC proposes custody rules for advisers and funds | How funds may hold crypto |
| 6 Oct 2026 | Ethereum Glamsterdam live on the Sepolia testnet | No mainnet date yet |
| 8 Oct 2026 | ESMA: non-MiCA stablecoin positions to close within three months | Unauthorised stablecoins pushed out |
| 16 Oct 2026 | Mt. Gox deadline moved to 31 Oct 2027 | Fourth one-year delay |
| 21 Oct 2026 | OCC final rule under the GENIUS Act; Solana Alpenglow live | First final stablecoin rule |
Four patterns the timeline shows
First, custody. Bitcoin’s own network has kept producing blocks since 2009, while the largest losses happened at companies holding coins for customers: Mt. Gox in 2014, Celsius and FTX in 2022, Bybit’s theft in 2025. In none of those cases did the Bitcoin or Ethereum ledger itself fail.
Second, rules follow failures. The SEC’s report came after The DAO. China’s ban and the SEC’s Munchee case came in the ICO boom. MiCA was adopted in 2023, after Terra and FTX had shown what unregulated stablecoins and exchanges could cost, and the GENIUS Act’s reserve rules answer the question Terra raised: what actually backs a stablecoin?
Third, each record was followed by a deep fall. Bitcoin lost more than 80% of its value between December 2017 and December 2018. After the November 2021 peak came the losses of 2022. In October 2026 it sits about a third below the October 2025 record. The history shows large swings in both directions; it does not show what comes next, and the guide crypto myths and facts takes apart the claims that it does.
Fourth, the technology kept being upgraded on schedule through every crash: halvings every 210,000 blocks, Ethereum’s Merge in the 2022 slump, Dencun, Pectra and Fusaka afterwards.
Smart contracts are the thread that runs from The DAO through DeFi and NFTs to today’s stablecoins. The next lesson, what a dApp is, looks at the applications built from them, and a later lesson compares layer 1 and layer 2 networks.
