Triumphs & Disasters

The FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht, shut down the darknet market and seized a large quantity of BTC. It is one of the most significant law-enforcement milestones in cryptocurrency history, and it sustained the "Bitcoin equals crime" narrative for years. Ulbricht received a presidential pardon in January 2025.

An exchange that once handled most of the world’s Bitcoin volume ceased trading and went bankrupt after roughly 850,000 BTC went missing (about 200,000 were later recovered). Measured in BTC lost, it remains, as of September 2026, the industry’s largest custodial failure, and it brought home to many that coins left with someone else are no longer an asset they can verify themselves.

31,591 BTC (about US$18.4 million) raised in 42 days, among the first large ICOs. It proved one thing: a protocol could raise its startup capital directly from users worldwide, with no institution vouching for it.

A reentrancy bug drained roughly 3.6 million ETH. The community split over whether to roll it back: the majority hard-forked on July 20, 2016, into what is now Ethereum (ETH), while those who insisted that code is law continued the original chain as Ethereum Classic (ETC). The split left a question still debated today: is immutability a technical property, or a choice?

About 119,754 BTC were stolen. Six years later, in 2022, the US Department of Justice arrested Lichtenstein and Morgan and recovered about 94,000 BTC (Lichtenstein later admitted he had carried out the 2016 hack himself) — the very openness of on-chain tracing eventually became a tool of law enforcement.

A week after Cboe launched the first regulated BTC futures on December 10, 2017, CME, the world’s largest futures exchange, listed BTC futures on December 17; around the same time BTC approached US$20,000 for the first time. It gave regulated finance its first route into bitcoin, six years before spot ETFs.

A "crypto lending platform" promising high fixed returns collapsed in January 2018. The US SEC filed suit in September 2021 alleging a roughly US$2 billion fraud, and in February 2022 the DOJ indicted its founder over an alleged US$2.4 billion Ponzi scheme; Satish Kumbhani remains a fugitive and has yet to stand trial.

China banned mining outright, forcing what was then nearly half the network’s hashpower to relocate across borders within months, and North America’s share jumped accordingly. Network hashpower briefly halved — and the network did not stop for a single day, as difficulty adjustment automatically pulled block times back to ten minutes.

Ethereum reformed its gas fee mechanism and introduced base-fee burning, so that part of every fee is destroyed permanently rather than paid to miners. Authors include Buterin, Conner and Dudley. It changed both Ethereum’s fee experience and its monetary policy.

Effective September 7, 2021, it made El Salvador the first sovereign state to give bitcoin legal-tender status. In January 2025, under an IMF loan agreement, El Salvador’s legislature amended the law: the requirement that merchants accept bitcoin was removed, in effect ending its legal-tender status. Actual adoption and economic effects remained disputed as of September 2026.

Bitcoin’s most significant upgrade since SegWit, activated at block 709632. It introduced Schnorr signatures and improved privacy and smart-contract capability. Authored by Wuille and others (BIPs 340/341/342). Note too that it paved the way for Ordinals (inscribing images, text and other data onto Bitcoin) — a use still disputed today.

A token issued off the back of a hit television series, promoted for a play-to-earn game, whose code restricted holders from selling. After the price rose, the project addresses pulled the funds out of the liquidity pool, leaving the token impossible to exchange for money, and the website and social accounts were taken down. Reported on-chain outflows range from about US$2.5 million to US$3.38 million; as of September 2026 the operators had not been publicly identified.

The algorithmic stablecoin UST held its one-dollar value not with dollar reserves but by being swappable for LUNA at any time. When UST lost its peg, mass swaps triggered a death spiral of unlimited LUNA issuance; value fell to almost nothing within a week and tens of billions of dollars evaporated. It is the definitive case of algorithmic-stablecoin design failure.

The lending platform Celsius froze withdrawals and went bankrupt, and the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital was liquidated, triggering industry-wide deleveraging. Users handed coins to a platform in exchange for interest and had no way to check who the platform had lent them to — a contemporary rerun of "trusted third parties are security holes".

Amid the same year’s wreckage, Ethereum completed its migration to proof-of-stake, cutting energy use by roughly 99.95%. As the market fell, a years-long engineering upgrade shipped on schedule. Technical detail is in the World Computer unit of Everything On-Chain.

Once a leading crypto exchange, it collapsed into bankruptcy within days on misappropriation of customer funds and a liquidity crisis, leaving a shortfall of some US$8 billion. Its founder, SBF, was convicted of fraud and other charges and sentenced to 25 years. The court found that the core offense was the misappropriation of customer funds. Seen another way, it was one of the most traditional kinds of financial fraud: the problem lay with a centralized institution, not with blockchain technology itself.

The US SEC approved the first eleven spot Bitcoin ETFs (from issuers including BlackRock and Fidelity), opening a channel for regulated capital. In a statement the same day, SEC Chair Gensler said the approval was not an endorsement of Bitcoin itself and warned investors of the risks.

At block 840,000 the reward fell from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. No announcement, no meeting, no vote — a single rule shipped with the first release in 2009 executed itself. It is verifiable on-chain by anyone.