2011 · 5 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2011? All 5 events on this timeline, including Bitcoin Reaches Parity with the US Dollar — each dated, categorised and sourced.
This archive records five events for 2011, from Silk Road Opens as a Bitcoin-Only Marketplace in February to Charlie Lee Releases Litecoin on 7 October. Network launches accounts for the largest share of the year with two entries, ahead of market milestones. The same year also brought Bitcoin Reaches Parity with the US Dollar and Namecoin Launches as the First Altcoin. Each entry below carries its exact date, a short factual summary and a link to the source it was checked against.
By category, 2011 breaks down into two network launches, one market milestone, one hack or exploit and one adoption or institutional entry.
Network Launches
Market Milestones
Hacks & Exploits
Adoption & Institutions
Every entry gives the date it happened, its category, a factual summary, and links to the original source and to the same entry in the full timeline.
Ross Ulbricht launched a Tor-hosted market that accepted bitcoin exclusively. It gave the currency its first sustained real demand and, after a June 2011 Gawker article, its first mass audience — while permanently tying bitcoin to darknet commerce in the public mind.
Bitcoin traded at $1.00 on Mt. Gox for the first time, a level that turned an obscure experiment into a press story. Within four months it ran to $31 and then collapsed by more than 90%, establishing the boom-bust pattern that has repeated in every cycle since.
Namecoin forked Bitcoin's codebase to store .bit domain records on-chain, becoming the first altcoin and the first attempt to use a blockchain for something other than money. It also introduced merged mining, letting miners secure two chains with the same work.
An attacker with a compromised auditor account dumped bitcoin on Mt. Gox, driving the quoted price from about $17 to $0.01 within minutes before trading was halted and trades were rolled back. It was the industry's first demonstration that exchange failure, not protocol failure, is the real risk.
Litecoin kept Bitcoin's design but switched to Scrypt hashing, cut block time to 2.5 minutes and raised supply to 84 million. Released on GitHub on 7 October and live on 13 October 2011, it became the template for the "silver to Bitcoin's gold" altcoin and a frequent testbed for upgrades like SegWit.
This archive keeps a page for every year from 2008 to 2026. The sparser pre-Bitcoin entries from 1979 onward live in the full timeline.
