In 2008, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper to the public. Since this important day in cryptocurrency history, Bitcoin has risen to prices as high as $69,000 dollars, reaching a market capitalization over $1 trillion. How did crypto get to this point, and how far has the space come since these humble beginnings? Bitcoin was created to serve as a solution for the problem of peer-to-peer (p2p) transactions, and quickly caught on amongst Cypherpunks and avid believers in digital currency. Bitcoin’s innovation came through the novel blockchain technology, which allowed for a verifiable record of all user transactions involving Bitcoin. As the years went on, the cryptocurrency space saw other coins pop up like Litecoin and Monero, in addition to a multitude of failed projects and exchanges. While many failed, some like Binance were able to cement a place in the wild world of crypto, remaining one of the largest centralized exchanges in the space to this day. It wasn’t until 2014 when crypto saw a decent competitor to Bitcoin come along. The Ethereum ICO raised around $20 million, and quickly grew in popularity due to the innovative Proof-of-Stake (PoS) technology backing it. As more caught on to the innovations possible with blockchain technology, more coins utilizing PoS were created, ultimately driving more users and speculators to the space. Since then, Ethereum has risen to become the second largest coin by market capitalization behind Bitcoin, sitting at around $400 billion at the time of writing this. Crypto has experienced two previous market cycles in its relatively short history, and is currently in what many believe to be its third bull run. The total market capitalization has risen to over $2.5 trillion, and is currently around $2.3 trillion. Many major institutions from the world of traditional finance have caught on to crypto, and it seems as if more hop into the space with each passing month. As more money has been able to flow through various crypto projects and protocols, intelligent developers have created various innovations, whether it be decentralized finance or NFTs. The speed of innovation in crypto has been accelerating in recent years, and more money than ever is entering the space in new ways every year. Traditional venture funds are allocating a portion of their assets to crypto, helping further mass adoption and incentivizing new ideas. As time goes on, cryptocurrency will only continue to change and innovate - history has shown that this is something crypto is great at doing.
knower
research at reflexivity