2024 · 8 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2024? All 8 events on this timeline, including Fourth Bitcoin Halving: 6.25 to 3.125 BTC — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2024 is the year regulated products became the main channel into crypto. The SEC approved eleven spot bitcoin ETFs on 10 January, ending a decade of rejections, and those funds absorbed tens of billions of dollars over the following year. Bitcoin set a new high above $73,000 in March — before a halving rather than after one, which is unusual — and the fourth halving followed in April, cutting the subsidy to 3.125 BTC. Spot ether ETFs listed in July without staking rewards. The November US election repriced the asset class on policy expectation alone, and bitcoin crossed $100,000 on 5 December.
By category, 2024 breaks down into three market milestones, three regulatory and policy decisions, one technical milestone and one bitcoin halving.
Technical Milestones
Bitcoin Halvings
Market Milestones
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.
After a decade of rejections and a court loss, the SEC approved spot products from BlackRock, Fidelity, Ark and others; trading began the next day. The funds absorbed tens of billions of dollars within a year, making regulated wrappers the dominant channel for new institutional demand.
EIP-4844 introduced blob transactions, a cheap short-lived data lane priced separately from regular gas. Layer 2 transaction fees fell by an order of magnitude within days, turning rollups from a promising design into the practical default for Ethereum activity.
Bitcoin reached about $73,750, exceeding its 2021 peak for the first time and, unusually, doing so before rather than after a halving. Sustained ETF inflows were the main driver, marking the point where regulated demand replaced retail speculation as the marginal buyer.
Block 840,000 cut the subsidy to 3.125 BTC and daily issuance to about 450 coins. Runes launched in the same block, so transaction fees briefly exceeded the block reward several times over — the first real preview of a fee-funded security budget.
Nine spot ether funds listed after the SEC approved their 19b-4 filings in May, implicitly conceding that ETH is not a security. Staking rewards were excluded from the initial structures, so the products tracked price only and drew far smaller flows than the bitcoin funds.
Donald Trump's victory, after a campaign that promised to fire the SEC chair and build a bitcoin reserve, sent bitcoin to a record within hours and lifted it above $90,000 within two weeks. Policy expectation, rather than any protocol change, drove the strongest quarter since 2021.
Sixteen years after the whitepaper, bitcoin traded above six figures for the first time, briefly pushing its market capitalization near $2 trillion. The milestone came on the same day the incoming administration named a crypto-friendly SEC chair nominee.
The crypto-asset service provider regime took effect across the EU, requiring authorization to run an exchange, custody or brokerage in any member state. Existing firms entered a grandfathering window of up to eighteen months, and non-compliant stablecoins were delisted from EU venues.
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.
