Anonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto sends an email to the Cypherpunk mailing list with a whitepaper that would change finance—and the world: “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper.” The 9-page whitepaper accompanies the launch of Bitcoin.com and introduces the world to Bitcoin and early concepts of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Nakamoto’s landmark whitepaper envisions an entirely peer-to-peer, anonymous, trustless digital payment system; a decentralized dream that would one day form the bedrock of cryptocurrency as a whole.

Satoshi Nakamoto makes his Bitcoin dream a reality after creating and launching the Bitcoin network. He shepherds the blossoming Bitcoin community by forming the BitcoinTalk message board, sharing updates on his profile on the P2P foundation website, and emailing with Bitcoin core developers. But after a mere two years, Satoshi Nakamoto exits Bitcoin and disappears completely off the face of the Internet.

Satoshi Nakamoto mines Bitcoin’s Genesis Block, realizing his vision from the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Like Nakamoto, the Genesis Block is shrouded in mystery: it contains a mined 50 Bitcoins locked in Bitcoin’s code forever; a headline from The Times, “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” lives on the block as plain text; and Bitcoin’s second block takes 6 days to be mined after the Genesis Block.

Two BitcoinTalk members, Laszlo Hanyecz (laszlo) and Jeremy Sturdivant (jercos), make history with the first-ever transaction using Bitcoin as payment for goods. Hanyecz sends Sturdivant 10,000 BTC to facilitate an order for a now fabled meal: two Papa John’s Pizzas.

In 12 years, Bitcoin faces black swan event after black swan event: hacking attempts, failed Bitcoin exchanges, regulation, international bans, flash crashes, and more. Yet Bitcoin’s price perseveres, fighting to reach $1 before exploding past that and hitting new two-, three-, four-, and eventually five-figure highs consistently for a decade.

Mt. Gox, originally built to trade Magic Cards online before becoming one of the top Bitcoin exchanges, goes permanently offline. The abrupt shutdown evaporates millions in BTC holdings into dust. A hack in June 2013 struck the first cracks in Mt. Gox’s foundation, and legal troubles, frequent market shutdowns, withdrawal and trading freezes foreshadowed the beginning of the end.

Russian-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin publishes the Ethereum whitepaper. The whitepaper proposes the new Ethereum blockchain, powered by the Ether coin, to expand upon on-chain technology with smart contracts. The whitepaper considers the possibilities of developing decentralized applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain, making way for new financial, social, art, and cultural technology to be built, preserved, and innovated upon on-chain.

Silk Road, the Amazon.com of drugs on the dark web, shuts down following an investigation led by the FBI. The marketplace transacted exclusively in Bitcoin, creating a link between the coin and millions in illegal sales it facilitated. However, the end of the Silk Road decouples Bitcoin from illegal activity, and its progress in the wake solidifies the coin as a legitimate currency.

Bitcoin faces its first major conflict: the Bitcoin civil war. The war wages over the block size debate. Does a network update increase the block limit at the cost of decentralization in massive mining farms’ favor? Or will blocks be kept small to continue an equal mining ecosystem true to Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision? Big Blockers and Small Blockers take their sides, and the civil war results in the Segregated Witness update to the Bitcoin Network and the formation of the Bitcoin Cash coin.

Ethereum officially launches with Frontier, the network’s first live release, and mines its Genesis Block. The Genesis Block is mined in 15 seconds and distributes 5 ETH for its block reward to the 8,893 participants of the ETH initial coin offering. With Frontier, the Ethereum network’s completely open-source software goes live for everyone.

Users exploit a security flaw to steal 3.6 million ETH—around $50 million—from the DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. The DAO previously raised more than $150 million in its initial coin offering. A plan is hatched to hard fork—update and split—the Ethereum network to save the stolen funds, creating a new Ethereum blockchain and establishing the previous blockchain as Ethereum Classic.

The Rare Pepes digital trading card series debut as the first major tokenized asset backed by Bitcoin. Inspired by the original Rare Pepe meme, these Rare Pepes—led by the Rare Pepe Foundation—curate cards from a growing community of collectors and hand-pick artists to include in each new series. Notable auctions and growing value in OG cards previews what’s to come from digital assets tied to cryptocurrencies.

Larva Labs release the CryptoPunks NFT collection for free, comprising 10,000 characters uniquely generated and inspired by the punk and cypherpunk cultural movements. The collection is one of the very first NFT collections backed by Ethereum and becomes the influential benchmark for all NFT collections and technology to follow in its footsteps, including the ERC-721 standard to implement NFTs into ETH smart contracts.

Erick Calderon—known online as Snowfro—creates Art Blocks, a platform for minting on-chain, generative art collections on the Ethereum blockchain. Early collections such as Calderon’s own Chromie Squiggle, Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza, and Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers quickly become worth millions in collective value, and generative art backed by NFTs enter the conversations for both crypto art and the wider art market.

Mike Winkelmann—known also as Beeple, his artist alias—sells his “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” NFT for 42,329 ETH, $69.3 million, at Christie’s in the art house’s first-ever NFT auction. “Everydays” creates a collage of Beeple’s first 5,000 art pieces from his ongoing Everydays art project, and it becomes the most expensive NFT ever sold.

BBC features the “Right-click and Save As guy” art piece by crypto artist XCOPY. Just a month prior, XCOPY tweeted “we're not mainstream until we see right-click save as guy on TV.” XCOPY’s piece satirizes the critics who question the true ownership and value of NFTs and would later sell for millions of dollars.

After grossing nearly $70 million in a Dutch auction, the Pixelmon NFT MMORPG reveals its monster designs with a whimper: floating dragons; invisible monsters hiding under grass; and Kevin, the cross-eyed, hunch-backed face of the disastrous reveal. The reveal dramatically reshapes not only the Pixelmon project, but the general attitude toward NFT founders and their promises.

Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club becomes the new face of NFTs as a single Bored Ape skyrockets to a double-digit and eventually triple-digit ETH floor. During meteoric growth, Yuga revolutionizes NFTs with releasing the Bored Ape partner collection Mutant Ape Yacht Club, signing with manager Guy Oseary to leverage celebrity partnerships, beginning work on the metaverse game Otherside, and acquiring other NFT collections like CryptoPunks and Meebits.

During a party in Los Angeles, the Azuki NFT project airdrops all of its holders' new NFTs: mysterious crates with something hiding inside. The airdrop becomes legend after Zagabond, one of Azuki’s founders, appears on video to thank the Azuki community…and leaves with one more message: “Check your wallets.”

At the height of the 2021-2022 NFT bull run, several collections earned a “blue chip,” or safe investment, status: Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, Doodles, Clone X, and many more. Floor prices ranged from 20 to 150 ETH, vindicating holders, alluring the onlookers, and quieting the detractors. But when crypto tanks in mid-2022, NFT floors fall with it, throwing the entire idea of an NFT blue chip into question.

Crypto hit an apex in late 2021, but by mid-2022, spiking global inflation and rising interest rates in the US plunge crypto prices to pre-bull market prices. This retrace kicks the bottom out from crypto funds like 3 Arrows Capital, “stablecoins” like TerraUSD, and even exchanges like FTX, exposing a tangled web of overleveraged assets and margin calls and spreading financial contagion to everyone from the 1% to everyday holders.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s eccentric personality elevates him from generic tech founder to an icon, inspiring the “my entire net worth is in this man's hands” meme. The meme grows even more powerful as Buterin continues pushing Ethereum network development, writing articles on the state of blockchain tech, and speaking at conferences fully dressed in bear costumes and Shiba Inu pajamas. Turns out, Buterin’s mere day-to-day existence does in fact shape Ethereum.

Like Bitcoin, Ethereum launched as a proof-of-work blockchain. But in September 2022, developers roll out The Merge, an update converting Ethereum to a proof-of-stake blockchain. The Merge aims to make Ethereum more energy efficient, better equipped for scaling, and less exposed to coin inflation. The Merge fundamentally changes Ethereum on the most technical level, but retains the core technology that users, holders, and the wider community fell in love with in the first place.

During the NFT bull run, marketplaces vie for superiority as NFT sales rake in billions of dollars. OpenSea initially takes the top spot and fights off other marketplaces like X2Y2, but as crypto retraces by mid-2022, NFT volume falls off a cliff. Marketplaces like Blur enter the arena by gamifying NFT sales with points tied to a token airdrop and reducing creator royalties to 0, throwing a shaky market into a high-stakes, player vs player battleground for NFT markets and NFT traders alike.

Casey Rodarmor utilizes the Taproot upgrade to the Bitcoin network to create Ordinals, a protocol where data—in the form of images, gifs, text, etc.—can be permanently inscribed onto satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin. The protocol catches on, creating a new wave of Bitcoin NFTs, shitcoins, and technology and booming Bitcoin network activity.