2022 · 11 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2022? All 11 events on this timeline, including The Merge: Ethereum Switches to Proof of Stake — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2022 is the year the leverage built up in the previous cycle unwound in public. It began with bridge failures — Wormhole in February and Ronin in March, together worth nearly $1 billion — and turned systemic in May, when Terra's UST lost its dollar peg and roughly $40 billion evaporated in a week. Celsius froze 1.7 million accounts in June, Three Arrows Capital entered liquidation in July, and FTX filed for bankruptcy in November with an $8 billion shortfall in customer funds. In the middle of all of it, Ethereum completed the Merge in September, switching a live network carrying hundreds of billions in assets to proof of stake with no downtime.
By category, 2022 breaks down into four crashes and crises, four hacks and exploits, two regulatory and policy decisions and one technical milestone. Six of those entries carry a disclosed dollar figure: $1.71 billion stolen across four entries, $8 billion customer shortfall and $40 billion value destroyed. These are different kinds of number and are not added together.
Technical Milestones
Crashes & Crises
Hacks & Exploits
Regulation & Policy
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.
A signature-verification bug let an attacker mint 120,000 wrapped ETH on Solana without depositing collateral. Jump Crypto replaced the funds within a day to keep Solana DeFi solvent, an early sign that bridges were the weakest link in a multi-chain world.
Executive Order 14067 directed agencies to study consumer protection, financial stability, illicit finance and a possible central bank digital dollar. It was the first whole-of-government US crypto policy framework and set the research agenda that later produced enforcement waves and legislative drafts.
Attackers obtained five of nine validator keys — four from Sky Mavis and one from the Axie DAO — and withdrew 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC. Nobody noticed for six days. The FBI attributed the theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group, which became the industry's most persistent adversary.
The algorithmic stablecoin lost its dollar peg and its mint-and-burn arbitrage turned into a death spiral, destroying roughly $40 billion of value in a week. Anchor's 20% yield had drawn in retail savings worldwide, and the failure triggered the contagion that took down 3AC, Celsius and Voyager.
The lender suspended withdrawals citing "extreme market conditions," then filed for bankruptcy in July with a $1.2 billion balance-sheet hole. Founder Alex Mashinsky later pleaded guilty to fraud. Celsius became the definitive case study in unsecured retail yield products.
A BVI court ordered the $10 billion hedge fund liquidated on 27 June and it filed for Chapter 15 in New York days later. 3AC had borrowed from nearly every crypto lender with little collateral, so its default propagated straight into Voyager, BlockFi and Genesis.
A botched upgrade made every message appear pre-approved, so anyone could copy the first exploit transaction, swap in their own address and withdraw. Hundreds of addresses joined within hours, making it the first crowdsourced hack; about 20% was later returned by white hats.
OFAC added the Ethereum mixer's smart contract addresses to the SDN list, the first time autonomous code rather than a person or entity was sanctioned. A developer was arrested in the Netherlands, and a US court later ruled that immutable contracts could not be designated as property.
Ethereum swapped its consensus engine for the Beacon Chain in a live network with hundreds of billions in assets and no downtime. Energy use dropped by about 99.95% and net issuance fell roughly 88%, completing a re-architecture that had been promised since 2014.
An attacker forged Merkle proofs to mint 2 million BNB out of thin air. Binance persuaded its 26 validators to halt the entire chain within hours, containing on-chain losses to roughly $100 million but demonstrating just how few parties could stop the network.
Ten days after a leaked balance sheet showed Alameda Research holding mostly FTT, a bank run drained FTX and the exchange filed for Chapter 11 with an $8 billion shortfall in customer funds. Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud in 2023 and sentenced to 25 years.
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.
