A Timeline of Blockchain Technology

(All these events are explained here and here and there's also a Powerpoint presentation)

Oct 2008: Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper
Jan 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto sends a bitcoin to Hal Finney (genesis 03.01.2009)
2009: Colin Percival invents the cryptographic algorithm Scrypt

Nov 2010: Bitcoin Pooled Mining Server, the first mining pool (later renamed Slush Pool)

Apr 2011: Satoshi Nakamoto announces that he is leaving Bitcoin development and five core developers take over from him (Gavin Andresen, Pieter Wuille, Wladimir van der Laan, Gregory Maxwell, and Jeff Garzik
Apr 2011: Namecoin (Vincent Durham), a Bitcoin fork that also acts as a domain name registry (genesis 19.04.2011)
Jul 2011: Bitcoin's price jumps to $32 (up from $1 in April)
Jul 2011: "QuantumMechanic" introduces Proof-of-Stake consensus
Oct 2011: Litecoin (Google employee Charles Lee), a bitcoin fork, the first major "alt coin" (genesis 13.10.2011)
2011: Zk-SNARKs (Alessandro Chiesa)

Mar 2012: Yoni Assia in Israel on his blog conceives of "colored coins" that can represent collectibles (the first non-fungible tokens)
August 2012: PPCoin/Peercoin/Primecoin ("Sunny King"), first implementation of Proof-of-Stake (genesis 19.08.2012)
Oct 2012: Coinbase (Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam in San Francisco), a bitcoin wallet
Dec 2012: "Nicolas van Saberhagen"'s CryptoNote protocol (first version) for privacy and anonymity on the Bitcoin blockchain

Jan 2013: Avalon's A3256 (Nangeng Zhang), an ASIC mining chip
Apr 2013: OpenCoin/Ripple (Jed McCaleb in San Francisco), an evolution of Ryan Fugger's Ripplepay (genesis 11.04.2013)
Apr 2013: Jeremy Spilman's Bitcoin payment channels
Apr 2013: Dave Kleiman dies (the most likely identity of Satoshi Nakamoto)
May 2013: Matthew Green's "Zerocoin" for anonymity
Jun 2013: BitFury's BF756C55 (Valery Vavilov & George Kikvadze), an ASIC mining chip
Jul 2013: The mining pool GHash.io is founded by cryptocurrency exchange Cex.io
Jul 2013: Omni/Mastercoin (JR Willett) carries out the first ICO (genesis 31.07.2013)
Aug 2013: Gregory Maxwell's "coinjoin" technique
Oct 2013: Circle (Jeremy Allaire & Sean Neville in Boston), another bitcoin wallet
Sep 2013: NXT's ICO
Sep 2013: The multiplayer game Bitnopoly introduces the BitPoints version that uses bitcoins
Sep 2013: Daniel Larimer writes about Decentralized Autonomous Corporations and Vitalik Buterin writes about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
Sep 2013: Huobi (Leon Li in China), cryptocurrency exchange
Oct 2013: Blockchain Capital in San Francisco, a venture capital company for cryto investments
Oct 2013: Gridcoin (Rob Halford), based on Proof of Stake and distributed on the BOINC network (genesis 16.10.2013)
Nov 2013: NXT (by "BCNext"), based on Proof-of-Stake (genesis 24.11.2013)
Nov 2013: 21 Inc (Matthew Pauker & Balaji Srinivasan) to mine bitcoins
Nov 2013: Bitmain's BM1380 (Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu), an ASIC mining chip
Nov 2013: The 19-year-old bitcoin developer Vitalik Buterin publishes Ethereum's white paper
Dec 2013: Bitcoin hits $1,156
Dec 2013: Dogecoin (Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer), designed to serve no real purpose other than to poke fun on Bitcoin (genesis 06.12.2013)
Dec 2013: Daniel Larimer invents delegated Proof of Stake for his project BitShares
Dec 2013: Emercoin, a Peercoin fork based on both Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Work (genesis 11.12.2013)
Dec 2013: Yonatan Sompolinsky's and Aviv Zohar's GHOST (Greedy Heaviest Observed Subtree) protocol
2013: Stefan Dziembowski's Proof-of-Space algorithm
2013: Pantera Capital's first investment in bitcoin

Jan 2014: Xcoin (Evan Duffield), later renamed Darkcoin and then Dash (genesis 19.01.2014)
Jan 2014: Vertcoin (Poramin Insom), an ASIC resistant Proof-of-Work mechanism
Jan 2014: SolarCoin (Francois Sonnet and Nick Gogerty), a Litecoin fork that rewards solar-energy production
Feb 2014: Counterparty (Robert Dermody, Adam Krellenstein, Evan Wagner), a protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain that is a Turing-complete smart-contracts platform, and the third ICO (genesis 01.02.2014)
Feb 2014: HunterCoin (Andrew Colosimo), a blockchain-based massively multi-player online game based on a Namecoin fork
Mar 2014: Bytecoin, the first "privacy coin" based on the CryptoNote protocol (genesis 18.04.2014, claimed 04.07.2012)
Apr 2014: Monero (Riccardo Spagni), a "privacy coin" based on the CryptoNote protocol (genesis 18.04.2014)
Apr 2014: ConsenSys (Martin Koeppelmann & Joseph Lubin), a software company to develop decentralized software
Apr 2014: Karmacoin's ICO
May 2014: Jae Kwon's Tendermint in San Francisco, based on practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant
May 2014: The first-ever non-fungible token (NFT), "Quantum", is minted by artist Kevin McCoy and engineer Anil Dish
May 2014: NXT's Asset Exchange, the first platform to create and exchange "colored" coins
Jun 2014: Aeon, a lighter version of Monero, also based on the CryptoNote protocol (genesis 06.06.2014)
Jun 2014: Swarm (Joel Dietz), a Bitcoin-powered crowdfunding platform
Jun 2014: Notary service Factom (Paul Snow)
Jul 2014: Swarm's ICO
Jul 2014: Launch of BitShares, a blockchain based on delegated Proof of Stake, the first stablecoin (BitUSD) and the first successful DAO (genesis 19.07.2014)
Jul 2014: Stellar (Jed McCaleb), a Ripple-like cross-border payment service, based on David Mazieres' Federated Byzantine Agreement
Jul 2014: Bitnation (Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof), a platform to create DAOs or decentralised government projects
Jul 2014: Realcoin/Tether/USDT (Brock Pierce, Craig Sellars, and Reeve Collins), a stablecoin
Jul 2014: The GHash.io mining pool holds more than 51% of Bitcoin's hashrate and voluntarily committs to reduce its share of the network
Aug 2014: The ICO of Ethereum (Buterin with Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson and Anthony Di Iorio)
Aug 2014: Burstcoin, later renamed Signum, a "green" NXT-based cryptocurrency that uses Proof-of-Capacity, a kind of Proof of Space (genesis 11.08.2014)
Aug 2014: The Tezos white paper by "Leah McGrath Goodman" (Arthur Breitman)
Sep 2014: Cryptocurrency hedge fund Metastable Capital (Joshua Seims)
Sep 2014: NuBits (Jordan Lee), an algorithmic stablecoin governed by a DAO
Dec 2014: BitQuest, a Minecraft server that connects the game economics to a Bitcoin wallet
Dec 2014: Shawn Wilkinson's Storj white paper
2014: CoinCloud (Chris McAlary), first cryptocurrency ATM

Feb 2015: InterPlanetary File System/IPFS (Juan Benet)
Mar 2015: New Economy Movement (NEM) from Singapore (genesis 31.03.2015)
Mar 2015: Rune Christensen's post, "Introducing eDollar, the ultimate stablecoin on Ethereum"
Jun 2015: Siacoin (David Vodrick and Luke Champine), a decentralized cloud storage network
Jul 2015: Ethereum (Vitalik Buterin), a Turing-complete smart-contracts platform (genesis 30.07.2015)
Aug 2015: Bitcoin XT fork (Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen)
Aug 2015: Casper the Friendly Ghost (Vlad Zamfir), which adapts the GHOST (Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree) protocol for Proof-of-Work consensus to Proof-of-Stake
Sep 2015: DagCoin's white paper (Sergio Demian Lerner)
Sep 2015: 21 Inc announces the first computer with native hardware and software support for bitcoin
Oct 2015: Digital Currency Group (Barry Silbert), a venture-capital firm focused on cryptocurrencies
Oct 2015: Ittay Eyal's Bitcoin-NG protocol
Oct 2015: RaiBlocks/Nano (Colin LeMahieu), a cryptocurrency that uses block lattice technology, derived from DAGs (directed acyclic graphs)
Nov 2015: Ethereum introduces the ERC20 token standard
Dec 2015: The Linux Foundation launches the Hyperledger open-source framework
2015: Litecoin is the second cryptocurrency for market capitalization after Bitcoin
2015: Gregory Maxwell's "confidential transactions" algorithm
2015: There are more than 70 alt-coins running on the Bitcoin protocol
2015: Coinbase becomes the first-ever cryptocurrency unicorn ($1.6 billion valuation)

Jan 2016: Joseph Poon's and Thaddeus Dryja's Lightning protocol
Mar 2016: DigixDAO (Kai Chng and Anthony Eufemio in Singapore) carries out the first ever ICO on the Ethereum blockchain
Apr 2016: Steemit (Ned Scott & Daniel Larimer), a decentralized social networking platform with a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar (genesis 04.06.2016)
Apr 2016: The DAO (Christoph Jentzsch in Germany), the first DAO created on Ethereum, raises a record US$150 million
May 2016: Lisk (Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows), based on delegated Proof of Stake, to develop dApps (genesis 24.05.2016)
Jun 2016: ICO of Stratis (Chris Trew), blockchain-as-a-service
Jun 2016: A hacker hacks The DAO and steals $50 million in ether
Jun 2016: Trent McConaghy's article "The DCS Triangle - Decentralized, Consistent, Scalable. Pick any two" about the blockchain trilemma
Jul 2016: EtherDelta (Zachary Coburn), a decentralized exchange based on Ethereum to exchange ERC20 tokens
Jul 2016: ConsenSys introduces the utility Infura to access the Ethereum blockchain
Jul 2016: Iota (Serguei Popov), a blockchain for the Internet-of-Things
Jul 2016: Ed Felten's and Steven Goldfeder's textbook "Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies"
Aug 2016: The ByzCoin sharding blockchain by Bryan Ford's team at EPFL in Switzerland
Sep 2016: ICO of Rchain Cooperative (Greg Meredith)
Sep 2016: ConsenSys introduces the Ethereum wallet MetaMask
Sep 2016: Cryptocurrency hedge fund Polychain Capital (Olaf Carlson)
Oct 2016: Zcash (Zooko Wilcox), a privacy coin on the Bitcoin blockchain (genesis 28.10.2016)
Oct 2016: Loi Luu's Elastico protocol
Oct 2016: Founding of Dfinity (Dominic Williams in Palo Alto) to develop a platform for decentralized cloud computing
Oct 2016: AntShares (HongFei Da & Erik Zhang), later renamed NEO, based on delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance, to develop dApps (genesis 17.10.2016)
Oct 2016: SegWit optimization (Pieter Wuille)
Nov 2016: Corda (David Rutter) to develop dApps, custom-designed for financial applications, based on a distributed ledger that is not a blockchain
Nov 2016: The Golem Network (Julian Zawistowski in Poland), a decentralized sharing economy of computing power (on Ethereum)
Dec 2016: Bitcoin has a $12 billion market capitalization
2016: Intel's Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET)
2016: Ripple is the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Bitcoin and Ethereum

Jan 2017: Bitcoin surges past $1000 for the first time in 3 years
Feb 2017: Nick Szabo's essay "Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability"
Mar 2017: Ark SmartBridge (Travis Walker), based on delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance, to develop dApps (genesis 21.03.2017)
Apr 2017: ICO of Gnosis (Martin Kueppelmann and Stefan George), a multi-signature wallet, a ConsenSys spinoff
May 2017: ETHLend (Stani Kulechov), later renamed Aave, an Ethereum-based lending and borrowing platform
May 2017: Aragon's ICO (Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo) for the creation and management of DAOs
Jun 2017: The ICO of Status.im (Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts), an instant messenger dApp for smartphones, raises more than $100 million in less than 24 hours
Jun 2017: Bancor (Galia Benartzi) completes the largest yet ICO ($150 million)
Jun 2017: Yu-te Lin's Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Jul 2017: EOS (Daniel Larimer), based on delegated Proof-of-Stake, to develop dApps (genesis 01.07.2017)
Jul 2017: Juan Benet's Proof-of-Replication
Jul 2017: Hyperledger Fabric for permissioned blockchains
Jul 2017: ICO of Tezos (Arthur & Kathleen Breitman), a dApp platform based on PoS (genesis 30.06.2018), a new ICO record ($232 million)
Jul 2017: ICO Of Binance (Changpeng Zhao), a decentralized exchange
Jul 2017: Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric to develop dApps
Jul 2017: Powerledger (Jemma Green and others in Australia) for trading renewable energy
Aug 2017: ICO of Filecoin (Juan Benet), a decentralized data storage network
Aug 2017: Joseph Poon's and Vitalik Buterin's Plasma to increase transaction throughput on Ethereum
Aug 2017: Bitcoin Cash (BCH) forks from Bitcoin (BTC)
Aug 2017: Bitcoin's upgrade SegWit (Segregated Witness)
Aug 2017: Tron (Justin Sun in Singapore), a platform for entertainment dApps, based on PoS, with an on-chain governance system (genesis 28.08.2017)
Aug 2017: Kyle Samani's and Tushar Jain's cryptofund Multicoin Capital
Sep 2017: Filecoin's ICO sets a new record
Sep 2017: IDEX decentralized Ethereum exchange
Oct 2017: Bancor launches (Galia Benartzi), a liquidity pool protocol
Oct 2017: Dapper Labs' CryptoKitties, a cryptogame on the Ethereum blockchain
Oct 2017: Vitalik Buterin's and Virgil Griffith's Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget
Oct 2017: Mastercard adopts blockchain technology for cross-border payments
Nov 2017: The Bank of England carries out its first inter-bank transaction using Ripple
Nov 2017: Anatoly Yakovenko's Proof of History consensus mechanism
Nov 2017: Andrew Miller's state channels
Dec 2017: Bitcoin reaches $20,089
Dec 2017: Hackers hack EtherDelta and steal users' money
Dec 2017: MakerDAO (Rune Christensen), an Ethereum-based lending platform that issues the stablecoin DAI, the first stablecoin governed by a DAO after BitUSD and NuBits
Dec 2017: Cardano (Charles Hoskinson), based on PoS, to develop dApps (genesis 26.12.2017)
Aug 2017: The Qtum ERC20 token has a valuation of $1 billion
Aug 2017: The OmiseGo ERC20 token (later renamed OMC Network) has a $1 billion valuation
Aug 2017: Basecoin (Nader Al-Naji, Josh Chen and Lawrence Diao), an algorithmic stablecoin
Aug 2017: Ouroboros (Vassilis Zikas), a Proof-of-Stake protocol
Oct 2017: Qtum (Patrick Dai, Jordan Earls and Neil Mahl in China), a platform for dApps, based on PoS, launches (no more on Ethereum)
Nov 2017: Solida consensus algorithm from VMWare
2017: China and South Korea ban ICOs
2017: More than $4 billion are raised through ICOs and 99% of ICO tokens implement ERC20
Dec 2017: OpenSea (Devin Finzer & Alex Atallah in New York), the first marketplace for non-fungible tokens on Ethereum
2017: MoonPay for crypto payments (by Ivan Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond in Poland

Jan 2018: ERC-721, the standard for NFTs
Jan 2018: Eli Ben-Sasson's zk-STARKs
Jan 2018: CryptoTab, a web browser with bitcoin mining features
Jan 2018: EOS has a market capitalization of $6 billion and Cardano a $31 billion market capitalization
Feb 2018: Venezuela's cryptocurrency petro
Feb 2018: Kyber Network (Loi Luu, Victor Tran, and Yaron Velner in Singapore), a liquidity protocol
Feb 2018: Telegram's $1.7 billion "private" ICO
Feb 2018: Robinhood, the mobile app for trading stocks, begins trading cryptocurrencies
Mar 2018: DigixDAO's DGX, a cryptocurrency tied to gold
Mar 2018: DAOstack (Matan Field and Adam Levi) launches on Ethereum, for the creation and management of DAOs
Mar 2018: Axie Infinity (Sky Mavis, i.e. Andy Ho, Aleksander Larsen, Trung Nguyen and Jeffrey Zirlin in Vietnam), an Ethereum-based decentralized game
Mar 2018: DMarket (Vlad Panchenko and Tamara Slanova in Ukraine), a blockchain-based marketplace to trade virtual game assets
Apr 2018: Coinbase Ventures (Emilie Choi)
Apr 2018: My Crypto Heroes (Hironobu Ueno), a blockchain-based game
Apr 2018: Celsius (Alexander Mashinsky & Daniel Leon), a lending platform on Ethereum
May 2018: Kodak's ICO
May 2018: The anonymous "Snowflake to Avalanche" paper introduces Avalanche, a family of consensus protocols
May 2018: Fcoin (Jian Zhang in China), an exchange offering liquidity mining
Jun 2018: Andreessen Horowitz's first crypto-focused fund, a $300M venture fund
Jun 2018: Jeremiah Wagstaff's and Nazar Mokrynskyi's white paper for Subspace and Proof-of-Archival-Storage
Jun 2018: Enjin (Witek Radomski and Maxim Baglov) launches a platform to develop NFT-based games
Jul 2018: Matt Huang's and Fred Ehrsam's Paradigm, an investment firm focused on cryptocurrencies
Aug 2018: Camp Mobile's Zepeto (South Korea), a social platform where users interact as 3D avatars
Aug 2018: White paper of Holochain (Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Brau in Gibraltar), an open-source framework for peer-to-peer applications that requires no mining
Sep 2018: Compound (Robert Leshner & Geoffrey Hayes)
Sep 2018: BitBay (David Zimbeck), an algorithmic stablecoin
Sep 2018: Vitalik's zk-Rollup to scale Ethereum with zk-SNARKS
Sep 2018: Republic (Taiyang Zhang and Loong Wang), later renamed Ren, a protocol for inter-blockchain liquidity
Sep 2018: Tron goes live
Sep 2018: USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, developed by the Centre consortium
Oct 2018: Storj (Shawn Wilkinson), a cryptocurrency to purchase disk space
Oct 2018: Barry WhiteHat's rollups
Nov 2018: Uniswap (Hayden Adams), a decentralized exchange for ERC20 tokens
Nov 2018: DAOStacks (Matan Field) introduces Holographic Consensus for DAOs
Dec 2018: EOS' year-long ICO raises over $4 billion dollars
Dec 2018: Substrate (Gavin Wood), a framework to quickly build blockchains
Dec 2018: Basecoin/Basis shuts down
2018: DAO Maker (in Prague), a cryptocurrency crowdfunding platform
2018: Eli Ben-Sasson's Zk-STARTs
2018: Circle has a $3 billion valuation
2018: Matter Labs, a zkEVM on Ethereum (by Alex Gluchowski and Alexandr Vlasov in Berlin)

Jan 2019: Zilliqa (Amrit Kumar, Xinshu Dong and Yaoqi Jia in Singapore), based on practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, to develop dApps, the first blockchain to implement sharding
Jan 2019: Zed Run (Chris Laurent and Rob Salha in Australia), an NFT-based game
Feb 2019: Ameen Soleiman "summons" the first Moloch DAO
Mar 2019: Theta (Mitch Liu and Jieyi Long), a decentralized video streaming platform
Mar 2019: Tendermint launches Cosmos, a Proof of Stake blockchain framework
Mar 2019: Dune Analytics, an Ethereum-centric analytics platform (by Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen in Oslo)
Apr 2019: Algorand (Silvio Micali), a platform for dApps, based on pure PoS
Apr 2019: The Cosmos network (Jae Kwon), a network of independent blockchains (genesis 22.04.2019)
May 2019: Chainlink (Sergey Nazarov), an oracle network on Ethereum
May 2019: Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang found the cryptocurrency exchange FTX
May 2019: dxDAO (Martin Kueppelmann of Gnosis), the first large-scale DAO
May 2019: MetaCartel Ventures DAO ("Pet3rPan" and Drew Harding), an investment fund for DAOs
Jun 2019: Ampleforth (Evan Kuo), an Ethereum-based algorithmic stablecoin
Jun 2019: Render (Jules Urbach), a decentralized rendering platform
Jun 2019: John Adler introduces Optimistic Rollup to improve the scalability of Ethereum
Jun 2019: Facebook announces its cryptocurrency Libra
Jun 2019: Tinlake (Lucas Vogelsang) to turn non-fungible assets into fungible ERC20 tokens
Jun 2019: Colony (Alex Rea and Collin Vine in London), a platform for creating DAOs
Jun 2019: Worldwide Asset eXchangeT aka WAX/Wax (William Quigley and Jonathan Yantis), an eco-friendly platform for dApps and NFTs
Jul 2019: Havven/ Synthetix (Kain Warwick), a derivatives platform on Ethereum, launches the first liquidity incentive program
Jul 2019: Terra's Luna (Daniel Shin and Do Kwon in South Korea), a stablecoin based on Tendermint (genesis 26.07.2019)
Jul 2019: Gods Unchained (James Ferguson and Robbie Ferguson), a blockchain-based game
Jul 2019: Bram Cohen's Proof of Space and Time
Aug 2019: DAOhaus (Dekan Brown), a platform to deploy MolochDAO clones (to "summon" a Moloch DAO)
Oct 2019: Vivek Bagaria's longest chain Proof-of-Stake protocol
Oct 2019: The Chinese government declares blockchain a core technology
Nov 2019: Monero adopts a new consensus mechanism, RandomX
Dec 2019: Gnosis Safe multi-signature wallet

Jan 2020: Bitcoin has declined to $7,200
Jan 2020: Rarible (Alexei Falin and Alex Salnikov), a decentralized exchange for NFTs
Jan 2020: Curve (Michael Egorov), an exchange for stablecoins
Feb 2020: The "flash loan" incident on lending platform bZx
Mar 2020: The covid pandemic causes a drop of 30% in the price of Ethereum's currency, causing a general bust in DeFi projects
Mar 2020: Cardano's off-chain scalability protocol Ouroboros Hydra
Mar 2020: Balancer (Fernando Martinelli in Portugal), a protocol for programmable liquidity
Apr 2020: Celo (Rene Reinsberg), a decentralized mobile payment app, based on Istanbul's Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Proof-of-Stake
Apr 2020: Near (Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin) to create dApps, based on Proof-of-Stake and designed to be progressively more sharded
Apr 2020: OpenLaw's LAO
Apr 2020: Solana (Anatoly Yakovenko), a blockchain for dApps, based on Proof-of-History and Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
Apr 2020: Andreessen Horowitz's second cryptocurrency-focused fund Crypto Fund II ($515 million )
Apr 2020: Chia Network (Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent protocol) in beta, based on a Proof of Space-Time consensus algorithm
May 2020: Compound launches a liquidity mining program
May 2020: Polkadot (Gavin Wood), based on PoS, built on Substrate, to integrate different blockchains (genesis 26.05.2020)
May 2020: Centrifuge (Lucas Vogelsang), a protocol to bring physical assets into DeFi
May 2020: Matic (Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal and Anurag Arjun) for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks (later renamed Polygon)
Jun 2020: Telegram agrees to return $1.2 billion to investors for its failed ICO
Jun 2020: OMG Network (Jun Hasegawa and Donnie Harinsut in Thailand), based on PoS, a payment system on top of Ethereum's Plasma, goes live
Jun 2020: Compound and Balancer issue government tokens
Jun 2020: StarkEx scalability engine for Ethereum (Eli Ben-Sasson)
Jul 2020: Yearn Finance (Andre Cronje), a yield optimiser
Jul 2020: Elrond (Beniamin and Lucian Mincu in Malta), to build dApps
Jul 2020: Karma DAO (Andrew Lee), a private telegram group with tokenized membership
Aug 2020: Decentralized exchange SushiSwap
Aug 2020: Shiba Inu (created by "Ryoshi"), a joke on Dogecoin, a joke of a joke
Aug 2020: Curve becomes an Aragon-based DAO
Aug 2020: Collab.Land (MolochDAO's cofounder James Young and Raymond Feng in Los Angeles) for community management
Aug 2020: Binance Smart Chain for running dApps
Aug 2020: Balancer's Snapshot (Jorge Izquierdo)
Aug 2020: Da Hongfei (NEO's cofounder), Jun Li (Ontology blockchain) and Switcheo (Ivan Poon and Henry Chua) launch the interoperability protocol alliance Poly Network
Aug 2020: Yam (Brock Elmore), a price-elastic token
2020: Four DeFi projects have already passed $1 billion in assets, namely MakerDAO, Compound, Aave and Curve
Sep 2020: Uniswap becomes a DAO while its monthly volume has gone from $169 million in April to over $15 billion
Sep 2020: Joachim Neu and Ertem Nusret Tas's ebb-and-flow protocols at Stanford
Sep 2020: Avalanche (Emin Sirer), a platform for DeFi projects
Oct 2020: Launch of Filecoin (Juan Benet), a decentralized data storage network
Oct 2020: The Flamingo DAO (by the LAO) for collecting non-fungible tokens
Nov 2020: dxDAO launches Swapr, the first DeFi protocol launched by a DAO on Ethereum
Nov 2020: Concordium's finality gadget Afgjort Thomas Dinsdale-Young, November 2020
Nov 2020: VMWare's blockchain
Dec 2020: Mirror.xyz (Denis Nazarov), a decentralized blogging platform
Dec 2020: Efforce (Jacopo Visetti), a cryptocurrency that rewards energy-efficient remodeling
Dec 2020: The Graph (Yaniv Tal), a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data
Dec 2020: Huobi Eco Chain (Leon Li) for running dApps
Dec 2020: Alien Worlds (Sarojini McKenna, Michael Yeates and Rob Allen), a Wax-based game with six DAOs
Dec 2020: 1,400 dApps have been created on Tron and Tron's capitalization passes $2 billion
Dec 2020: StarkEx 2.0, based on Eli Ben-Sasson's Cairo language

2021: Chenhe Zhang's Proof of Comprehensive Performance algorithm
Jan 2021: Bitcoin passes $40,000
Jan 2021: The Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge to transfer assets between Ethereum and Avalanche
Jan 2021: Dapper Labs' Flow, a blockchain for NFTs and cryptogames, based on a variant of Proof-of-Stakes
Jan 2021: Coinbase's assetts are worth more than $90 billion
Jan 2021: Dogecoin becomes a popular meme on Reddit's WallStreetBets message board
Feb 2021: Uniswap becomes the first DeFi platform to process over $100 billion in volume
Feb 2021: The Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol of the Cosmos network
Mar 2021: Uniswap's market capitalization reaches $17 billion
Apr 2021: Bitcoin passes $64,000
Apr 2021: Star Atlas (Michael Wagner and Jacob Floyd), a GameFi project on Solana
Apr 2021: Mobox, an NFT-based platform of free-to-play games with DeFi features
Apr 2021: Ethverse (Alex Cupra and Sandeep Rajput), a metaverse built on the Minecraft gaming engine and the Ethereum blockchain
Apr 2021: Alien Worlds is the largest blockchain-based gaming app and second biggest overall dApp
Apr 2021: The two largest stablecoins are USDT (Tether) and USDC
Apr 2021: MakerDAO begins issuing loans backed by real-estate assets
May 2021: Dogecoin has become the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization with a market capitalization of $50 billion having increased more than 6,000% in five months
May 2021: Bram Cohen's "green" coin Chia
May 2021: Dfinity launches the "Internet Computer", a platform for dApps
May 2021: Bitcoin's hashrate reaches an all-time high of 180.6 exahashes per second
Jun 2021: Zepeto introduces gaming-producing features similar to Roblox
Jun 2021: Andreessen Horowitz's third cryptocurrency-focused fund ($2.2 billion)
Jun 2021: The total supply of MakerDAO's stablecoin DAI surpasses the $5 billion mark
Jun 2021: Concordium (Mateusz Tilewski in Denmark), a Proof-of-Stake blockchain
Jul 2021: Wyoming becomes the first state of the USA to recognize DAOs as legal entities
Jul 2021: MakerDAO shuts down its foundation and leaves only the DAO
Jul 2021: In six months the NFT market hits a record $2.5 billion in sales, compared with just $13.7 million in the same period of 2020
Jul 2021: Starlink (June Komori, Justin Martin and Kevin Schow in Los Angeles), a metaverse DAO (governance token STARL)
Aug 2021: The total stablecoin supply surpasses the $100 billion mark
Aug 2021: Ethereum adopts EIP-1559 to make its ether a deflationary asset
Aug 2021: More than $600 million are stolen when Poly Network is hacked, largest DeFi security breach yet
Aug 2021: Axie Infinity becomes the first cryptogame to pass $1 billion in sales
Aug 2021: Celsius' assetts are worth more than $20 billion
Aug 2021: Market capitalizations in billion dollars: Bitcoin (BTC) $902, Ethereum (ETH) $419, Cardano (ADA) $77, Binance (BNB) $70, Tether (USDT) $68, Ripple (XRP) $50, Solana (SOL) $44, Polkadot (DOT) $36, Dogecoin (DOGE) $32. Total cryptocurrency market capitalization: $2.17 trillion
Aug 2021: SecondLive, a metaverse built on Binance Smart Chain
Aug 2021: Ethereum's L2 layer Arbitrum (Ed Felten)
Aug 2021: Kong Land, a cryptostate
Sep 2021: Crust (Leo Wang & Chen Bao), a decentralized storage network
Sep 2021: El Salvador becomes the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender
Sep 2021: China bans all cryptocurrency transactions and mining
Sep 2021: In one year stablecoins have grown from $17 billion to $116 billion
Sep 2021: Decentr (Nikita Anikeev), a browser integrated with a blockchain
Sep 2021: Charles Hoskinson's Cardano-based metaverse Pavia
Sep 2021: Ahmad Irshaid's NFT marketplace Magic Eden
Oct 2021: Facebook changes name to Meta, focuses on the metaverse, and the market capitalization of metaverse-related tokens reaches $13.4 billion overnight
Oct 2021: Orca (Julia Rosenberg and John Sterlacci), a platform on Avalanche to create DAOs
Oct 2021: Wax is the most used blockchain in the world by number of daily transactions and daily users
Oct 2021: Jesse Walden's Variant Fund launches a $110M fund for crypto startups
Oct 2021: Shiba Inu, "the joke coin of a joke coin", becomes the 9th-largest cryptocurrency by total value ($37 billion) passing Dogecoin ($36 billion)
Oct 2021: Tron launches a $300 million fund called JustPlay to invest in GameFi projects
Nov 2021: Huobi's NFT marketplace
Nov 2021: Brave Browser (Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich) integrates a crypto wallet
Nov 2021: Random Earth's 3D-world "Terra One" on Zepeto
Nov 2021: Bit.Country (Ray Liu in New Zealand) launches on Polkadot's canary network Kusama
Nov 2021: Bitcoin's value peaks at almost $70,000
Dec 2021: China's largest crypto exchange, Huobi, moves to Singapore
Oct 2021: Random Earth (Los Angeles) launches an NFT marketplace on the Terra blockchain
Dec 2021: Spanish fashion chain Zara launches AZ, a virtual clothing collection on Zepeto
Dec 2021: Zepeto has almost a quarter of a billion users, 70% of which are women
Dec 2021: The first parachains go live on Polkadot: Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar and Clover.
Jan 2022: Astar (Sota Watanabe in Berkeley) a platform on Polkadot for dApps
Jan 2022: Syndicate (Ian Lee) to create investing DAOs
Mar 2022: Christian Zhang's Solana-based metaverse Solice
May 2022: Bitcoin's value drops by 50% since its November 2021 peak to $27,000
May 2022: The Terra Luna token loses 99% of its value, from a high of $118 down to $0.09, a total loss of almost $40 billion
Jun 2022: Salesforce launches NFT Cloud to mint and exchange NFTs
Jun 2022: Crypto�s total market capitalization falls below $1 trillion
Sep 2022: Ethereum switches to Proof-of-Stake
Oct 2022: Aptos' blockchain for the metaverse on the mainnet
Nov 2022: FTX files for bankruptcy
Nov 2022: One bitcoin is worth $15757, its lowest value since November 2020
Nov 2022: Mysten Labs' Sui Layer 1 blockchain for the metaverse in beta
Dec 2022: Both Aptos and Mysten Labs are valued at $2 billion
Mar 2023: One bitcoin is worth $26993
May 2023: The USA sues Binance and Coinbase
Jun 2023: Bitcoin's value has increased 96% since November 2022, from $15,603 to 30,000
Nov 2023: Binance's billionaire CEO Changpeng Zhao pleads guilty to money laundering violations and is forced to resign

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