Published May 22, 2022
By Qredo Team
Crypto Milestones — 5 New Dates for Your Diary
May 22nd is Bitcoin Pizza Day, a celebration of the day in 2010 when Laszlo Hanyecz, an early bitcoin miner, used the cryptocurrency for its first known real-world transaction.
Crypto has come a long way since. Here are five other must-know anniversaries that celebrate blockchain's continuing and long-term revolution.
July 31st – The first ICO: MasterCoin
Built by Seattle developer J.R. Willett, MasterCoin was a protocol layer that leveraged the existing Bitcoin blockchain to deliver new features and capabilities.
The term Initial Coin Offering didn’t exist yet so, on July 31st, 2013, Willett started a “fundraiser” through a simple thread on the bitcointalk.org forum. To participate, investors sent bitcoins to a specific "Exodus Address".
Without any real marketing, Willet raised nearly 5,000 BTC (worth approx $500k at the time). To motivate potential investors, he also added protocol features that were available only to MasterCoin owners – effectively the first token utility.
You can still see the original Google Sheet showing how they spent the funds raised.
January 1st – Joseph Lubin encounters Vitalik Buterin
In late December 2013, Joseph Lubin, then a disillusioned software engineer dabbling in music production, traveled to Toronto to see his parents over the holiday season.
On New Year’s Day 2014, he went to a local bitcoin enthusiast meet-up where he met the gifted 19 year-old mathematician and college dropout Vitalik Buterin.
They spoke for only a few minutes but Buterin explained his vision and later that night Lubin read his white paper. The rest is history.
Lubin joined the core team that went on to build and launch the Ethereum platform in July 2015. The same year, Lubin founded ConsenSys, the future home of leading decentralized applications like MetaMask and Codefi.
May 2nd – Minting of first NFT, Quantam
At a hackathon on May 2nd, 2014, artist Kevin McCoy and coder Anil Dash collaborated to mint the Quantam token on the Namecoin blockchain.
Their goal was to give digital artists a new way to control the ownership and monetization of their work.
"I certainly thought it was a big idea at the time," McCoy said in a 2021 interview with Ocula Magazine. "Seven years later the world has taken notice and that is gratifying. That said, we are still early in realising the full possibilities of this form."
In June, 2021, the NFT was sold at the Southeby’s Natively Digital auction for $1.47m to Alex Amsel/Sillytuna (though there then followed a complex but interesting legal dispute about who really owned the NFT).
November 3rd – MPC makes its debut
Brainchild of the pioneering computer scientist Andrew Yao, Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is the cryptographic breakthrough by which by two or more parties can jointly compute data without revealing their respective inputs.
It was introduced in a paper submitted by Yao on November 3rd, 1978 to a computer science symposium in Chicago.
In the paper, Yao famously invited readers to use MPC to solve the “Millionaire’s Problem”: How can two millionaires having lunch discover who is richer without either revealing their individual wealth?
MPC has since evolved well-beyond a theoretical curiosity and is now one of the most active areas of applied cryptography.
Qredo has taken this application furthest, coupling MPC with its own decentralized Layer 2 network to create Decentralized MPC (dMPC).
Through decentralized MPC, the signing of cryptoasset transactions is distributed securely between a consensus-driven network of computers – with none of the risks associated with private keys or key shards.
🤯 Discover why MPC is revolutionizing digital assets
September 22nd - The first atomic swap
At Qredo, we're all about crosschain interoperability so this important date is close to our heart 💖
The possibility of peer-to-peer swaps between blockchains was first explored by Sergio Demian Lerner in 2012 and then Tier Nolan in 2013.
Crypto trading remained, however, an activity that could only be carried out anonymously and through intermediaries and platforms such as Coinbase and Kraken.
This all changed on September 22nd, 2017 when computer scientist and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee managed to complete the exchange of 10 LTC for 0.1167 BTC.
It was a significant moment, ushering in new ambitions and solutions focused on a truly interoperable, multichain crypto ecosystem.