2015 · 3 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2015? All 3 events on this timeline, including Ethereum Frontier Goes Live — each dated, categorised and sourced.
This archive records three events for 2015, from Ethereum Frontier Goes Live on 30 July to Linux Foundation Launches Hyperledger on 17 December. Adoption and institutions accounts for the largest share of the year with two entries, ahead of network launches. The same year also brought The Economist Runs "The Trust Machine" Cover. Each entry below carries its exact date, a short factual summary and a link to the source it was checked against.
By category, 2015 breaks down into two adoption and institutional entries and one network launch.
Network Launches
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.
The first Ethereum mainnet release shipped as a deliberately bare-bones "frontier" for developers, with a gas limit canary and command-line-only tooling. Despite the warnings, contracts deployed in the first weeks — and the EVM has run continuously ever since.
Exactly seven years after the whitepaper, The Economist argued that the blockchain — not bitcoin the currency — was the important invention. The framing legitimized enterprise blockchain in boardrooms and launched a wave of bank consortium projects, most of which quietly ended.
IBM, Intel, JPMorgan and others formed an open-source consortium for permissioned enterprise ledgers. Hyperledger Fabric became the default choice for supply-chain and trade-finance pilots, defining the private-blockchain branch of the industry that runs parallel to public networks.
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.
