2023 · 9 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2023? All 9 events on this timeline, including Ordinals Brings Inscriptions to Bitcoin — each dated, categorised and sourced.
This archive records nine events for 2023, from Ordinals Brings Inscriptions to Bitcoin on 21 January to Binance Pays $4.3 Billion and CZ Steps Down on 21 November. Regulation and policy accounts for the largest share of the year with five entries, ahead of technical milestones. The same year also brought Shanghai/Capella Enables Staking Withdrawals and USDC Depegs After Silicon Valley Bank Fails. Each entry below carries its exact date, a short factual summary and a link to the source it was checked against.
By category, 2023 breaks down into five regulatory and policy decisions, two technical milestones, one crash or crisis and one adoption or institutional entry. One of those entries carries a disclosed dollar figure: $4.3 billion settlement paid. These are different kinds of number and are not added together.
Technical Milestones
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.
Casey Rodarmor's protocol numbers individual satoshis and lets arbitrary data be inscribed into witness space opened by SegWit and Taproot. It created Bitcoin-native NFTs and the BRC-20 token standard, driving fee revenue to multi-year highs and reopening the block-space debate.
Circle disclosed $3.3 billion of USDC reserves stranded at the failed bank and the stablecoin traded as low as $0.87 before US regulators guaranteed deposits. It was the clearest demonstration that fully-reserved stablecoins inherit the credit risk of the banking system they rely on.
The Shapella upgrade let validators withdraw staked ETH for the first time since deposits opened in 2020, closing the last one-way door in Ethereum's transition. Feared as a sell-side shock, it instead increased staking participation by removing lock-up risk.
The agency accused both exchanges of operating unregistered securities marketplaces and listed a dozen tokens as securities. The back-to-back suits marked the peak of regulation-by-enforcement in the US, and both cases were dropped or narrowed after the 2025 change of administration.
The world's largest asset manager filed for the iShares Bitcoin Trust with a surveillance-sharing agreement designed to answer the SEC's manipulation objections. Given BlackRock's near-perfect ETF approval record, the filing reset market expectations and triggered a wave of competing applications.
Markets in Crypto-Assets gave the EU the first comprehensive crypto framework of any major jurisdiction, covering licensing, stablecoin reserves, market abuse and disclosure across 27 member states. Stablecoin rules applied from June 2024 and the full service-provider regime from December 2024.
Judge Analisa Torres held that Ripple's programmatic sales on exchanges did not meet the Howey test, while institutional sales did. The split ruling was the first major judicial pushback against the SEC's position and lifted XRP more than 70% in a day.
The DC Circuit called the SEC's refusal to convert GBTC into a spot ETF "arbitrary and capricious," noting the agency had already approved futures products tracking the same market. The ruling removed the last legal barrier and made spot approval a matter of timing.
Binance pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations in the largest corporate resolution in US crypto history, accepting a monitorship. Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty personally, resigned as CEO and served four months in prison.
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.
