Blockchain's Unlikely Origins in the Wake of Global Financial Crisis

The story of blockchain and digital assets began in 2008 when the global financial crisis almost brought the entire system to the brink of collapse. During this time, a white paper titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' was anonymously posted online by Satoshi Nakamoto.

The paper proposed a monetary system diametrically opposed to the one that led to the crisis. It outlined a network of peer-to-peer payments that were permissionless, decentralized, immutable, and transparent.

This new type of money had a capped supply, hardcoded into the software, and was maintained on a cryptographically secure, decentralized network of willing participants incentivized via a monetary policy similarly hardcoded into the system.