Cryptocurrency has become synonymous with a world revolution in how people perceive currency and has opened the pathway for modern international financial interactions. To truly understand the significance of crypto, we will explore the history of cryptocurrency, and dive into a discussion of the current state of the coin.

One Small Step from Man, One Major Step for Crypto.

While the development of the systems of crypto was started in the 90s, it was not until 2008 when an anonymous innovator, code-named Satoshi Nakamoto, published a paper that described a decentralized system that created a currency and did not involve any third parties. While the ideas were revolutionary at the time, Nakamoto then decided to take initiative with his idea and develop Bitcoin in 2009, and although for the first few years of operation Bitcoin was seen as solely an interesting idea, this was about to quickly change, and the world could have never seen the worldwide phenomenon crypto was going to become.

Crypto Skyrockets

While there was no noteworthy growth in Bitcoin in the early 2010s, 2017 was the defining year for the original token. It was late this year that people’s perception of crypto shifted from skepticism to embracing cryptocurrency as the future, and as an investment vehicle. With this, crypto’s growth skyrocketed. $1,000, $2,000, $20,000; Bitcoin’s growth seemed unstoppable, and while there was a crash that cut Bitcoin’s value in half, BTC quickly rebounded and reached new heights. After Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, other altcoins and exchanges quickly entered the public eye, and it looked like the blockchain revolution was unstoppable, or was it?

Stability, and Where Crypto is Today

Ever since Bitcoin’s inception, there was always worry about a decentralized currency’s stability. Due to the anonymity and no central backing, even when BTC experienced rapid growth, the currency was seen as chaotic and had a negative stigma as being an extremely high-risk investment. As the years pass and looking at the present day, we can see that Bitcoin has stabilized somewhat, but this does not mean that crypto is a “safe” currency (one can simply look at BTC’s June 2022 crash). Even though there is still relative risk with crypto, there is no denying that tokens have become a household name, and cryptocurrency currently commands a market cap of almost 1 trillion dollars.

The Future of Cryptocurrency

Today, while we are not in the days of late 2020 when people were creating thousands of altcoins every day, there is a hotbed of innovation that is going on from excited developers who want to be on the frontier of blockchain. For example, from Dartmouth Blockchain itself, we are involved in a cluster of activities that involve crypto; one project I am working on with two other members is a decentralized social trading platform.

Cryptocurrency is not going anywhere, and while it may or may not be a means to an end, crypto and its related applications represent a new revolution in web technology, comparable to the World Wide Web itself. The future of crypto is exciting, and if history has told us anything, it is that you do not want to get left behind.