2013 · 6 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2013? All 6 events on this timeline, including Vitalik Buterin Circulates the Ethereum Whitepaper — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2013 is the year bitcoin acquired both its first mass audience and its first regulators. Prices ran from $30 to about $266 in April on coverage of the Cyprus bank bailout, then collapsed when Mt. Gox halted trading under the order load. Autumn brought the FBI's seizure of Silk Road, an unexpectedly mild US Senate hearing, and a run past $1,200 driven largely by Chinese volume — before the People's Bank of China barred financial institutions from bitcoin in December and cut the price in half within three weeks. Vitalik Buterin circulated the Ethereum whitepaper that same November, arguing that one chain with a Turing-complete virtual machine could replace building a new chain per application.
By category, 2013 breaks down into three regulatory and policy decisions, one technical milestone, one market milestone and one crash or crisis.
Technical Milestones
Market Milestones
Crashes & Crises
Regulation & Policy
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.
Driven by Cyprus bank-bailout coverage, bitcoin ran from $30 to about $266 in a month. Mt. Gox buckled under order volume, halted trading, and the price collapsed to roughly $50. The episode exposed how thin the market's plumbing was relative to the attention it was attracting.
The FBI shut the marketplace and seized about 144,000 BTC from Ulbricht's wallets, later auctioning them. Bitcoin fell sharply on the news but recovered within weeks, and the case became the template for treating the currency as neutral infrastructure rather than contraband.
Buterin argued that instead of building a new chain for each application, one blockchain should ship a Turing-complete virtual machine and let developers deploy any logic on top. The paper reframed blockchains from payment ledgers into general-purpose computation platforms.
The Homeland Security Committee heard testimony describing bitcoin as a legitimate financial service with illicit-use risks, and the Fed's Ben Bernanke wrote that virtual currencies "may hold long-term promise." The unexpectedly mild tone helped push the price above $900 within days.
Bitcoin reached roughly $1,240 on Mt. Gox, briefly making one coin worth more than an ounce of gold. Chinese exchange volume was the main driver, and the peak marked the end of the first mania cycle — the price would not see this level again until early 2017.
The People's Bank of China and four ministries defined bitcoin as a "virtual commodity" rather than currency and prohibited banks and payment firms from handling it. Chinese exchanges lost fiat rails overnight and the global price fell by half within three weeks.
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.
