Era 07 · 2009 — Present

Crypto & Digital Fiat

What backs it

Backed by code

Pulse cycle

0.3s

Bitcoin proposed something new: money whose supply rules are enforced by mathematics rather than by a sovereign. Within fifteen years, crypto had become a $2T+ asset class and triggered central banks to build their own digital currencies. For the first time since the invention of coinage, the question of who issues money is genuinely open.

Events in this era

Jan 3, 2009

Bitcoin genesis block

Satoshi Nakamoto mined block 0 of the Bitcoin blockchain, embedded with the Times of London headline from that morning: 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.' The reward was 50 bitcoins, unspendable by protocol design. The whitepaper had been published on October 31, 2008, six weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The entire premise was regulatory failure and the belief that cryptographic proof could do what sovereigns were failing to. Satoshi disappeared from public communication in April 2011 and has never been identified.

Created a $2T+ asset class from zero

2020 — Present

CBDCs arrive

Watching crypto grow outside their control, more than 130 central banks began building digital versions of their own currencies. China launched the digital yuan in 2020. The ECB moved the digital euro into a preparation phase in 2023. Programmable state money is no longer hypothetical.

The state responds with programmable money

May 2022

Luna / UST algorithmic collapse

TerraUSD was an algorithmic stablecoin that held its peg to the dollar by dynamically minting and burning its partner token, Luna. When UST broke its peg on May 9, 2022, the mechanism designed to restore it produced an infinite supply of Luna to a nonexistent bid. Sixty billion dollars evaporated in three days. The first large-scale real-world test of crypto's claim to create sound money without reserves.

$60B destroyed; algorithmic stablecoin model discredited

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