2020 · 7 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2020? All 7 events on this timeline, including Third Bitcoin Halving: 12.5 to 6.25 BTC — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2020 compressed an entire cycle into ten months. In March, pandemic panic cut bitcoin from about $7,900 to below $4,000 in a day and left MakerDAO with bad debt from collateral auctions that cleared at zero bids. In May the third halving cut daily issuance to roughly 900 BTC, two months into unprecedented central-bank expansion. From June the direction reversed: Compound's COMP distribution started DeFi Summer, MicroStrategy became the first US public company to hold bitcoin as a treasury reserve, Uniswap's retroactive airdrop paid every past user, and Ethereum's Beacon Chain went live in December — three weeks before the SEC sued Ripple.
By category, 2020 breaks down into two technical milestones, one network launch, one bitcoin halving, one crash or crisis, one regulatory or policy decision and one adoption or institutional entry.
Technical Milestones
Network Launches
Bitcoin Halvings
Crashes & Crises
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.
As pandemic panic hit every asset class, bitcoin fell from about $7,900 to below $4,000 in twenty-four hours. Congested Ethereum blocks let MakerDAO collateral auctions clear at zero bids, leaving roughly $8 million of bad debt and forcing DeFi's first emergency recapitalization.
Block 630,000 cut daily issuance to about 900 BTC, two months after central banks began unprecedented monetary expansion. The timing gave the "digital scarcity" argument its widest audience yet and preceded the first wave of corporate treasury allocations.
Compound began distributing governance tokens to borrowers and lenders, and total value locked across DeFi jumped from under $1 billion to over $10 billion within months. Liquidity mining became the industry's default growth mechanism — and its default source of mercenary capital.
The Nasdaq-listed software firm bought 21,454 BTC as its primary treasury reserve asset, a first for a US public company. Michael Saylor then turned convertible debt and equity issuance into a repeatable bitcoin-accumulation machine that other corporate treasuries copied.
Uniswap gave 400 UNI — then worth about $1,200 — to every address that had ever used the protocol, a defensive response to SushiSwap's vampire attack. It established retroactive airdrops as the standard way to bootstrap governance and rewarded early users at unprecedented scale.
The proof-of-stake consensus layer launched after depositors locked over 524,000 ETH into a one-way contract with no withdrawal date. It ran in parallel with the proof-of-work chain for nearly two years, finalizing empty blocks while clients were hardened for the Merge.
The SEC alleged Ripple raised $1.3 billion through an unregistered securities offering. US exchanges delisted XRP within days. The case ran for years and produced the 2023 ruling that programmatic exchange sales were not securities transactions — the first substantive court limit on the agency's reach.
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.
