2021 · 11 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2021? All 11 events on this timeline, including Ethereum London Upgrade Introduces EIP-1559 — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2021 is the year crypto met mainstream capital. Tesla disclosed a $1.5 billion position in February, a Beeple NFT sold for $69.3 million at Christie's in March, and Coinbase listed directly on Nasdaq in April. The middle of the year broke the pattern: a 30% single-day drop in May, El Salvador making bitcoin legal tender in June, a $611 million theft from Poly Network in August, and China declaring all crypto transactions illegal in September. Ethereum's London upgrade introduced fee burning, and the year peaked at $68,789 on 10 November — a level not exceeded for more than three years.
By category, 2021 breaks down into four adoption and institutional entries, two technical milestones, two market milestones, one crash or crisis, one hack or exploit and one regulatory or policy decision. One of those entries carries a disclosed dollar figure: $611 million stolen. These are different kinds of number and are not added together.
Technical Milestones
Market Milestones
Crashes & Crises
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.
Tesla revealed the purchase in a 10-K filing and said it would accept bitcoin for cars. The price jumped above $44,000 the same day. Tesla suspended payments in May over energy concerns and sold 75% of the position in 2022, illustrating how fragile corporate conviction can be.
"Everydays: The First 5000 Days" became the third most expensive work by a living artist, sold by a 255-year-old auction house and paid for in ether. The result moved NFTs from crypto-native curiosity to a mainstream art-market and cultural phenomenon within a single news cycle.
Coinbase opened at $381, briefly valuing the exchange above $85 billion and giving public-market investors their first pure crypto equity. The listing is widely read as the local top of the spring 2021 rally; the stock fell more than 80% over the following year.
Chinese regulators reiterated a ban on financial institutions servicing crypto and Tesla had just suspended bitcoin payments; bitcoin fell from about $43,000 to $30,000 intraday and over $8 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated. It ended the first leg of the 2021 bull market.
The Legislative Assembly passed the Bitcoin Law 62-22, effective 7 September 2021, requiring businesses to accept bitcoin and launching the Chivo wallet with a $30 sign-up bonus. Adoption stayed limited, and IMF pressure led the mandatory-acceptance clause to be repealed in January 2025.
At block 12,965,000 Ethereum replaced first-price fee auctions with an algorithmic base fee that is burned rather than paid to miners. Fee estimation became predictable and ETH acquired a deflationary sink that has since destroyed millions of coins.
An attacker exploited a cross-chain contract flaw to drain assets across Ethereum, BNB Chain and Polygon in the largest DeFi theft to date. After the team offered a bug bounty and a chief security adviser role, the hacker returned nearly everything, calling it a demonstration of the vulnerability.
Ten agencies jointly banned all cryptocurrency-related business, explicitly including services provided from offshore to mainland users. Combined with the mining ban earlier that year, China's share of global bitcoin hash rate fell from about 65% to near zero, relocating mining to the US and Kazakhstan.
ProShares' BITO drew about $1 billion in its first two days, the strongest ETF debut on record at the time. It tracked CME futures rather than spot bitcoin, so holders paid roll costs — an imperfect wrapper that nonetheless proved institutional demand ahead of spot approval.
Bitcoin set what would remain its cycle high for more than three years, four days before the Taproot soft fork activated and amid record NFT volumes. Total crypto market capitalization touched roughly $3 trillion before a year-long decline began.
Bitcoin's first consensus change since SegWit bundled Schnorr signatures (BIP 340), Taproot outputs (BIP 341) and Tapscript (BIP 342). Miner signalling locked it in on 12 June 2021 at block 687,284 under Speedy Trial; five months later it went live, letting a single-key payment, a multisig and a complex script spend all look identical on-chain.
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.
