2016 · 5 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2016? All 5 events on this timeline, including Second Bitcoin Halving: 25 to 12.5 BTC — each dated, categorised and sourced.
This archive records five events for 2016, from Ethereum Homestead Upgrade on 14 March to Bitfinex Loses 119,756 BTC on 2 August. Technical milestones and hacks and exploits are the year's heaviest categories, with two entries each. The same year also brought Second Bitcoin Halving: 25 to 12.5 BTC and Ethereum Hard Forks, Creating Ethereum Classic. Each entry below carries its exact date, a short factual summary and a link to the source it was checked against.
By category, 2016 breaks down into two technical milestones, two hacks and exploits and one bitcoin halving. Two of those entries carry a disclosed dollar figure: $132 million stolen across two entries. These are different kinds of number and are not added together.
Technical Milestones
Bitcoin Halvings
Hacks & Exploits
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.
At block 1,150,000 Ethereum dropped the canary contracts, fixed contract-creation gas costs and declared the network production-ready. Homestead was the point at which Ethereum stopped calling itself experimental and became a platform teams were expected to build businesses on.
An attacker exploited a reentrancy flaw in the largest crowdfunded contract ever deployed, moving 3.6 million ETH — about $60 million, or a third of all circulating ether — into a child DAO. The hack forced Ethereum into the hardest governance decision of its history.
Block 420,000 cut the subsidy to 12.5 BTC. Unlike 2012, the event was widely anticipated and heavily traded in advance; the price was flat for months before the 2017 run. It also squeezed margins for older mining hardware and accelerated the shift to industrial-scale ASIC farms.
At block 1,920,000 the majority of the network executed a state-changing fork that returned the stolen DAO funds. A minority rejected it on "code is law" grounds and kept mining the original chain as Ethereum Classic, making the split the industry's defining test of immutability versus intervention.
Attackers broke a multisig arrangement between Bitfinex and BitGo and took 119,756 BTC, worth about $72 million at the time. Bitfinex socialized the loss across all customers with a 36% haircut and BFX tokens. US authorities recovered most of the coins in 2022, by then worth billions.
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.
