I have recently seen some very "nice" infographics of Crypto Innovation from the last 13 years but many of them miss out on the key points in the Crypto History.

In this post I will share my insights, 2 Technological Innovations and 7 Major Milestones, but please let me know yours in the comments.

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If I zoom right out and look back over the last 13 years, in my mind there are just 2 big technology innovations; The Blockchain Concept itself and Decentralised Apps + Releated Infrastructure (i.e. Accessible Smart Contracts).

"A solution looking for a problem"

Crypto has since 2009 been a journey to find use cases not technological innovation. There hasn't really been any significant technology milestones but there have been 7 Major Breakthroughs to date while people have been looking to see what problem this technology could solve.

For newcomers if you want to understand Crypto just focus on understanding these 2 technological innovations and the 7 Major Breakthoughs.

Lets take a step back for a minute ...

The Journey didn't begin with Bitcoin

If you came across bitcoin.org in 2009 you may not have realised that there were at least 40 years of innovation behind this minimal site.

<Source https://web.archive.org/>

Many contributions led to the confluence of events that was the Bitcoin Whitepaper and Genesis Block in 2009.

Since 2009 the technology has been tweaked. Bugs have been fixed and some improvements have been made.

The only remaining challenge for Crypto was/is to actually get it used daily by regular people.

On the quest to try to find out how to use Crypto there have been (at least) 7 Major Breakthroughs.

7 Key Moments

If I was building an infographic I would include the following seminal moments from the last 13 years

• First Crypto Exchanges
  Bitcoinmarket.com & MtGOX Establishment of an open market where you can buy and sell Bitcoin for FIAT was a key milestone. The first was Bitcoinmarket.com but the most famous early one was MtGOX.
• Goods and Services using Digital Peer to Peer Cash
  Wikipedia + Silk Road Establishment of Markets where Bitcoin or derivatives were actually used as a Peer to Peer cash were significant. The first real use cases where Bitcoin served a purpose were anonymous donations to Wikileaks and also as a Peer to Peer Cash on the Silk Road. There have been many other attempts and artificial use cases but none that have caught on yet.
• Stablecoins The concept of linking FIAT and Crypto with a stablecoin was concieved early on and the most notable one that is activitly used today is Tether, which was conceived in 2014 (named Realcoin)
• DAOs - Decentralised Governance The DAO As entities formed online, cross borders the concept of a Decentralised Autonamous Organisation was created. This has taken many forms in recent years but the name was coined in 2016 for a Project on the Ethereum Blockchain
• ICOs - Using Digital Tokens to Raise Finance Beyond cash for Sale of goods and Supply of Services the first other major Financial Use case was the ICO boom of 2017/2018. Companies began to raise funds through Initial Coin Offerings at scale. Many were rug pulls and the industry began to draw the interest of regulators.
• Mainstream Financial Instruments First Appear (Futures, ETFs) The Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched a Futures Market in 2017 and since then Crypto has been entering mainstream more and more. Exchange Traded Funds were first launched by Proshares in 2021. Crypto is going mainstream and accessible to the wider financial system.
• Crypto Accepted as a Legal Tender El Salvador in 2021 became the first Nation State to recognise Bitcoin as Legal Tender.

Do you agree, What would your top milestones be from the last 13 years?

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