2019 · 5 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2019? All 5 events on this timeline, including Ethereum Constantinople and St. Petersburg Activate — each dated, categorised and sourced.
This archive records five events for 2019, from Ethereum Constantinople and St. Petersburg Activate on 28 February to Xi Jinping Calls Blockchain a Core Technology on 24 October. Adoption and institutions accounts for the largest share of the year with two entries, ahead of technical milestones. The same year also brought Binance Hot Wallet Loses 7,000 BTC and Facebook Announces Libra. Each entry below carries its exact date, a short factual summary and a link to the source it was checked against.
By category, 2019 breaks down into two adoption and institutional entries, one technical milestone, one hack or exploit and one regulatory or policy decision. One of those entries carries a disclosed dollar figure: $40 million stolen. These are different kinds of number and are not added together.
Technical Milestones
Hacks & Exploits
Regulation & Policy
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.
Delayed from January after auditors found a reentrancy risk in EIP-1283, the fork activated at block 7,280,000 with cheaper bitwise operations, CREATE2 for counterfactual contract addresses, and a block reward cut from 3 to 2 ETH. CREATE2 later became core plumbing for account abstraction and state channels.
Attackers combined phishing, API keys and viruses to pull 7,000 BTC — about $40 million — from Binance's hot wallet in one transaction. Binance covered the loss from its SAFU insurance fund, which then became a standard feature that competitors were pressed to match.
Facebook proposed a basket-backed global currency governed by a Geneva association of 28 corporate members. Central banks and legislators reacted immediately; Visa, Mastercard and PayPal withdrew within months, and the project — renamed Diem — sold its assets and shut down in 2022.
Built by Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE's parent, Bakkt offered federally regulated futures that delivered actual bitcoin plus qualified custody. Early volumes were thin, but the custody infrastructure it built became a precondition for institutional allocation and, later, spot ETFs.
At a Politburo study session China's leader urged the country to "seize the opportunity" in blockchain. Bitcoin jumped over 30% in a day on the headline, even though the policy explicitly separated the technology from cryptocurrency trading, which stayed banned.
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.
