Blockchain and Crypto by Year: Timeline Archive 2008–2026

About this year archive

This is the year-by-year entrance to the archive. Each year page does one job: it puts every event recorded for that year in date order, states what happened, which category it belongs to and how much money was involved where a figure was disclosed, and links to the source each entry was checked against. If you want to know what happened in crypto in 2017, in what order the collapses of 2022 actually occurred, or why 2013 is described as the first mania, you can go straight to that year instead of reading the whole history first.

Not every year gets its own page. The archive holds 142 events spanning 1979 to 2026, but the early years often contain only one or two records — the Merkle tree in 1979, the term “smart contract” in 1994, b-money in 1998. Giving each of those a page would produce very thin reading, so the year pages start in 2008, the year the whitepaper was published, and run without a gap through 2026. The 12 sparser years before that are still covered in full on the timeline and in the cypherpunk material.

Every year page carries a written summary of the year, a category breakdown of its events, the complete list of entries in date order, and links to the previous and next year. All of it is generated from one structured dataset, so the dates and figures on a year page, on the full timeline and on the category pages cannot drift apart from each other.