History of blockchain

Blockchain was born from a political project (the cypherpunks, post-2008 distrust) that, in fifteen years, became a financial infrastructure courted by states and by the world's largest asset managers.

Blockchain did not come out of nowhere. As early as 1989, the cryptographer David Chaum launched eCash, the first anonymous electronic money. In 1991, Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta described a chain of time-stamped, cryptographically linked blocks, the direct conceptual ancestor of blockchain.

In the 1990s, the cypherpunk movement (privacy-activist cryptographers, whose 1993 manifesto proclaims that "cypherpunks write code") multiplied the building blocks: Adam Back's Hashcash (1997, proof of work), Wei Dai's b-money (1998), Nick Szabo's bit gold (1998), Szabo having already theorised the concept of the smart contract in 1994. All these attempts ran into the same problem: preventing the double spending of a digital currency without a central authority.

On 31 October 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis, an anonymous author using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page white paper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The solution to the double-spending problem: a distributed public ledger, secured by proof of work.

On 3 January 2009, Nakamoto mined the first block (the genesis block), in which he embedded a headline from that day's Times ("Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"), as much a political manifesto as a time stamp. On 22 May 2010 came the first commercial transaction: 10,000 BTC for two pizzas ("Bitcoin Pizza Day").

The early years mixed innovation and grey areas: the Silk Road black market (closed in 2013), the first altcoins, a first bubble at $1,000 at the end of 2013, then the collapse of the Mt. Gox platform (2014, about 850,000 BTC vanished), the first big lesson: "not your keys, not your coins".

In 2015, the young Vitalik Buterin launched Ethereum: a programmable blockchain, in which smart contracts execute code automatically. In 2016, the hack of "The DAO" (the first large decentralised fund) caused a historic split of the chain (Ethereum / Ethereum Classic) and a founding debate: is code really law?

2017 saw an explosion of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), fundraising in tokens, often with neither product nor guarantee, and bitcoin came close to $20,000 before a brutal "crypto winter" in 2018.

In 2019, the announcement of Facebook's Libra project (a global private currency) triggered an outcry from states: blockchain became a question of monetary sovereignty. The same year, France's PACTE law created the DASP status (digital asset service provider), one of the first frameworks in the world.

Summer 2020 launched decentralised finance (DeFi): lending, trading and saving without intermediaries, through smart contracts. 2021 was the year of every record: the NFT boom (Beeple's digital work sold for $69 million at Christie's), El Salvador adopted bitcoin as legal tender, the price reached $69,000, and China banned mining on its soil.

Then 2022 became an annus horribilis: the collapse of the algorithmic stablecoin Terra/Luna (May), cascading bankruptcies (Celsius, Three Arrows), and above all the fraudulent fall of FTX (November), the world's second-largest platform; its founder Sam Bankman-Fried would be sentenced to 25 years in prison. The same year, paradoxically, Ethereum completed "The Merge": the switch from proof of work to proof of stake, cutting its energy consumption by about 99.95%.

On 10 January 2024, the US regulator approved spot Bitcoin ETFs: BlackRock's IBIT became the fastest-growing ETF in history. April 2024: the fourth halving (the mining reward fell to 3.125 BTC). December 2024: the European MiCA regulation came fully into force.

In 2025, the United States changed course: creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve, adoption of the GENIUS Act regulating stablecoins, the stock market listing of Circle (issuer of USDC), and a bitcoin record around $126,000 in the autumn, before a sharp correction. In mid-2026, the market is consolidating (bitcoin around $65,000-70,000, a market capitalisation of about $1.3 trillion), while European banks launch their euro stablecoins and the French company Ledger prepares its arrival on Wall Street.