2018 · 2 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2018? All 2 events on this timeline, including Crypto Winter Bottoms Near $3,100 — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2018 is represented here by two entries at opposite ends of the year, and the distance between them is the story. January opened with the largest exchange theft since Mt. Gox: roughly 523 million XEM taken from a Coincheck hot wallet that had been kept without multisig protection. Eleven months later, after a November capitulation tied to the Bitcoin Cash hash war, bitcoin bottomed near $3,122 — about 84% below the previous December's peak. Most tokens sold in the 2017 ICO cycle lost more than 95% of their value and many teams shut down; the projects that survived the drawdown spent the following eighteen months building what became DeFi.
By category, 2018 breaks down into one crash or crisis and one hack or exploit. One of those entries carries a disclosed dollar figure: $530 million stolen. These are different kinds of number and are not added together.
Crashes & Crises
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.
Attackers took roughly 523 million XEM from a hot wallet that Coincheck had kept without multisig protection. The Tokyo exchange reimbursed customers from its own funds, and Japan's FSA responded with on-site inspections and a stricter licensing regime for domestic exchanges.
Bitcoin fell to roughly $3,122, about 84% below the 2017 peak, after a November capitulation tied to the Bitcoin Cash hash war. Most ICO tokens lost over 95% and many teams shut down; the survivors spent the next eighteen months building DeFi.
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.
