2026 · 12 recorded events (plus 1 planned)
What happened in crypto in 2026? All 12 events on this timeline, including The 20 Millionth Bitcoin Is Mined — each dated, categorised and sourced.
2026 is an unfinished year, and this archive covers it through July. It opened badly: bitcoin fell from about $96,000 to $80,000 in a single January session, hit a 15-month low near $62,854 in February, and reached a cycle low around $57,717 on 1 July — roughly 54% below the October 2025 peak. Policy moved in the opposite direction. The SEC and CFTC jointly classified sixteen tokens as digital commodities in March, MiCA's grandfathering window closed across the EU, and Russia passed its first comprehensive crypto law in July. In March the 20 millionth bitcoin was mined, 6,267 days after the genesis block.
By category, 2026 breaks down into five regulatory and policy decisions, three crashes and crises, two hacks and exploits, one technical milestone and one adoption or institutional entry. Three of those entries carry a disclosed dollar figure: $577 million stolen across two entries and $2.5 billion liquidated. These are different kinds of number and are not added together.
Technical 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.
Bitcoin dropped from about $96,000 to $80,000 in one session as expectations of a hawkish shift in US monetary policy took hold. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index fell to 6, its lowest reading since the FTX collapse, opening the worst quarter since 2022.
Bitcoin fell 14% in a day to about $62,854 and ether hit $1,820, its weakest since May 2025, as total crypto market capitalization slipped below $2.5 trillion for the first time since November 2024. Roughly $2.5 billion of long positions were liquidated.
Block 940,000 pushed circulating supply past 20 million BTC, 6,267 days after the genesis block and about 95.24% of the 21 million cap. Because of the halving schedule, the remaining million coins will take roughly 114 more years to issue.
A joint interpretation set out a five-category taxonomy — digital commodities, collectibles, tools, stablecoins and securities — and named sixteen assets including BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP as non-securities. It also clarified that protocol staking, mining and most airdrops are not securities transactions.
Attackers used social engineering to obtain privileged access, created a worthless token, manipulated its reported price and borrowed roughly $285 million against it. It is the second largest crypto theft since 2025 and a reminder that oracle and permission design remain the weak points.
Attackers compromised a third-party system used to verify cross-chain transactions, faked a collateral deposit on one chain and triggered the release of about $292 million of real assets on another. Cross-chain verification remained the single most expensive category of failure.
The committee voted 15-9 to send the market-structure bill to the Senate floor, ten months after House passage. Disputes over stablecoin yield, ethics restrictions on officials and law-enforcement powers kept a floor vote uncertain through the summer.
An 8-K disclosed the sale of 32 BTC for about $2.5 million between 26 and 31 May to fund preferred stock dividends, out of holdings of 843,706 BTC. The amount was trivial but it ended the "never sell" doctrine and the stock fell about 6% on the filing.
Bitcoin fell to about $57,717, roughly 54% below the October 2025 peak and 268 days into the drawdown, after $4.9 billion of quarterly ETF outflows and a hawkish Federal Reserve. The pattern closely resembles the reset years of 2014, 2018 and 2022.
The eighteen-month transitional window under Article 143(3) expired, so any firm providing crypto-asset services in the EU without MiCA authorization is now operating unlawfully. Several member states had closed their windows earlier, and unlicensed providers were required to wind down.
The State Duma approved a licensing framework for exchanges, brokers and depositories under central bank supervision, effective 1 September. Domestic crypto payments stay banned, retail purchases are capped at about $3,800 per intermediary per year, and foreign-trade settlement is permitted.
The Council's 21st sanctions package added 218 designations and created an Annex LVII mechanism allowing the EU to prohibit dealings with any crypto service provider in a listed third country. The transaction bans take effect on 25 August 2026.
Not yet activated as of late July 2026. Glamsterdam pairs EIP-7732 enshrined proposer-builder separation with EIP-7928 block-level access lists for parallel execution, alongside gas repricing aimed at a 200 million gas limit. Developers target late August, with no block height announced.
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.
