On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto revealed blockchain and bitcoin. Photo: Jeremy Bezanger.
Today is the most important day of celebration for the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. On October 31, 2008, so 13 years ago, someone – or “someones” – by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto released the white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Money System”. The world of currencies, stores of value and payments had changed.
Blockchain use is happening in all kinds of industries, governments and social projects. Bitcoin keeps breaking records and is no longer something practically worthless to be traded in the range of US$ 60 thousand (about R$ 360 thousand), in addition to replacing gold as protection against inflation for many investors. Traditional financial institutions have already set foot in this market. Governments are distressed and creating their encrypted currencies, including Brazil.
Blocknews invited experts to point out, in their view, 13 facts that had an impact on the ecosystem and beyond in these 13 years of the white paper. It’s the story told by them, including the editor-in-chief of Blocknews, Claudia Mancini. And the stories they tell is this:
2009, First bitcoin submission – Thiago Padovan, Movements founder
Thiago Padovan, founder of Movements and Blockchain Academy.
Defining a single event in Bitcoin history is an arduous task. We can list everything from Satoshi Nakamoto’s publications in the “Cryptography Mailing List”, to the publication of the white paper. We could even look at the pre-bitcoin moment with important milestones in the evolution and maturation of various technologies that allowed bitcoin to emerge at that time.
Exploring this story a little, I highlight a seemingly simple event, but one that was certainly a key spark to the whole impact we’re currently following: Hal Finney’s tweet announcing that bitcoin was running. With this, he was the first person to receive bitcoins directly from Satoshi Nakamoto.
A simple and voluntary movement to experiment with a new financial system alternative to the financial system we were used to until now, where anyone could send financial resources to anyone else in the world, without any intermediary or centralizer having to validate this transaction.
Hal Finney was a cryptography activist, software developer and was also known as a Cypherpunk (a person who advocates cryptography for ‘privacy and electronic money’ ) and certainly made history with his invaluable contributions. You can check the tweet through the link https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988
Absolutely revolutionary!
Rodrigoh Henriques, innovation leader at the National Federation of Central Bank Servants Associations (Fenasbac).
Two pizzas, four walls.
The story is famous, but probably not for the right reasons.
In May 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz posted on the bitcointalk forum his willingness to pay 10,000 bitcoins to anyone who delivered two large pizzas to his home. “What I want is to get the food in exchange for bitcoins,” he said. Years later, with bitcoin values ​​soaring, the pizzas would be worth millions of dollars each. More than $330 million each, to be exact.
If, for a minute, we can forget how much Hanyecz missed out on, we can see how much we all made. May 22, 2010 marks one of the first attempts to use a cryptocurrency to pay for something as trivial as receiving ready-made food at home. Pizzas are just a way to break the fourth wall, an expression used in the performing arts for an imaginary partition that separates the actors from the audience. With the fourth wall, the actors pretend that the audience is not there. They don’t interact with her, they don’t talk, they don’t dialogue. With the fourth wall, the audience passively watches what is unfolding on stage. Excited, furious, emotional or even hopeful, but always passive.
The two pizzas bring down the fourth wall of cryptocurrencies making actors and audience, crypto community and trust society look deeply at each other for the first time. Discussions about the need to connect the crypto world with the fiat world (of fiat currencies, issued by countries) have generated heated debates, important cracks, exchanges moving towards decentralization, payment layers, unlikely ATMs in the middle of the streets and, interestingly, two pizzas.
The day of the two pizzas should be remembered as the day we broke the fourth wall of the crypto world and passed, actors and audience, to being one.2014, NFTs – Caroline Nunes, CEO of InspireIP
Caroline Nunes, CEO of InspireIP.
It was August 3, 2014 and Kevin McBoy was creating what is now considered the first non-fungible token (NFT), the “Quantum” crypto art. Little did he know that seven years later his psychedelic NFT would be worth $7 million. This fact is part of the NFT boom, or as I like to call it, “NFT Revolution”.
The exorbitant values ​​that we are seeing in the market are not by chance – US$ 10 billion of NFTs traded in the second half of 2021. Calm down, I will not say that there is no hype in these numbers. There is a lot, but it is so necessary for the evolution of technology that it becomes practically inseparable from its success. By way of comparison: what would bitcoin be without good hype?
NFTs brought scarcity, rarity, value to digital. That’s why NFTs are so important to consumers. They know they are buying the original item. For content creators, they are even more exciting. The digital age has not been kind to artists – musicians and photographers seeing their work shared and copied for free over the internet. Even when items are purchased, most of the money is sucked in by industry giants.
What if there was a way for artists to cut through the middlemen and take their work directly to clients? Digital art, marketed online as NFTs, is the way forward. In addition to the art field, it is possible to see applications of NFTs in the real estate, legal, domain names, brands… The technology is really fantastic and the range of possibilities it brings is even more incredible.
And for everyone who criticizes the madness of the crypto arts and their stratospheric values… Well, how do we attribute value to something? Why should a Picasso be worth $200 million? Why do people own gold? It’s all about scarcity, exclusivity and provenance – and the NFTs provide that. As digital artist Beeple says : “This is art, there are no rules. At the end of the day, if someone is going to pay for it, then you can sell it.2015, Creation of Ethereum – MaurĂcio Magaldi, host of BlockDrops
Mauricio Magaldi, host of the BlockDrops podcast and executive superintendent of Banco Fibra.
I believe that the creation of the Ethereum is an extremely relevant milestone, which goes far beyond the recent record price of its native currency, the Ether (ETH) (as of October 29, 2021) . Ethereum, conceived by Vitalik Buterin in 2013 and publicly launched in 2015, introduced a jargon that has defined not only the crypto space, but also influenced all the blockchains that came later with a previously unheard of functionality: smart contracts .
By enabling the programming of network-wide business rules as part of the distributed infrastructure, smart contracts “unlocked” all subsequent innovations. These include newer ones such as asset tokenization, non-fungible tokens (the NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), and pay-based gaming (Play-to-Earn).
The impact of Ethereum even gave impetus to the creation of other blockchains aimed at the corporate world, such as Corda, from R3, and Fabric, from Project Hyperledger. This provoked an ever-widening movement not only from crypto-natives, but also from a market that, until then, equated blockchain with bitcoin, an asset they considered extremely exotic and almost impossible to classify.2015-2016, Blockchain for companies – Renato Teixeira, chairman of the Hyperledger Brasil community
Renato Teixeira, leader of the Hyperledger community in Brazil.
The emergence of blockchain technology, specifically blockchain for corporate use, is still very recent compared to other more established technologies. We still have a large field for the development of new solutions to be explored and many business models to be impacted by their benefits.
As it is still new, when it comes to this new technological model for the safe conduct of transactions between companies, many common doubts hover in the minds of technology teams and we still have to work on very basic themes, but no less relevant for the correct adoption of blockchain, for example, what is the difference between a relational database and a blockchain? Can I log all my data into the blockchain and use it as my only data repository? Can I create a network and just have the data saved? I don’t want my supplier to access my blockchain!
Fortunately, in spite of being a novelty and of all the challenges, the adoption of the blockchain by the enterprise technology market has been advancing consistently and, mainly, is gaining speed. It is already possible to see applications running associated with the most varied branches of markets, such as protein production, supply chain, finance, among others.
With the deployment of 5G more widely around the world the pressure on blockchain technologies is expected to increase considerably. The need for records with guaranteed origin and long-term consistency should force current platforms to rethink their strategies, as the volume of transactions is expected to grow exponentially and not all are prepared for this level of requirement. In a way, this is a good problem, as it is a sign that the technology has a real reason to exist.
After these 13 years, we continue to explain that blockchain is not bitcoin, but that today blockchain is better than bitcoin!2016, Creation of The Dao – Daniele Pegoraro, Instructor Exin Blockchain
Daniele Remoaldo Pegoraro, Exin Blockchain instructor and senior lawyer at Fundação Casper LĂbero (FCL).
The Dao was launched on April 30, 2016 as a venture capital fund whose purpose was to fund distributed applications on the blockchain, accumulating approximately $150 million dollars in ethers and containing over 11,000 members. In June 2016, a hacker started resetting ethers collected by token sales. On June 17, 3.6 million ethers (about US$50 million) were stolen from the fund’s accounts. Hacker discovered a flaw in the code that allowed him to execute the contract unexpectedly.
Most of the miners (85%) of Ethereum decided to fork the network, returning the diverted ethers. However, 15% of miners understood that this would distort the concept of immutability of the network, deciding to keep the blocks in the form they had been processed (with the hacker’s deviation), thus creating another blockchain, the Ethereum Classic (ETC). In this way, Ethereum Classic (formerly The DAO), preserved the unchanged transaction history and the fundamental principles of decentralization and immutability, being a blockchain independent of Ethereum.
I consider it a historic milestone in the network, as it was the first DAO to be created, being an innovative project by allowing anyone to present projects, being able to vote and still receive rewards. Although “The DAO” has not achieved the expected result, its original idea is still present in other DAOS successfully created and established, being another great advance and a milestone for blockchain technology.2016, The Dao Hack – Carl Amorim, CEO of BRI Brasil
Carl Amorim, CEO of Blockchain Research Institute (BRI) Brazil.
I believe The Dao hack left a very bad message for the development of Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), which is putting all the blame on a technology failure when the problem is the business model. A false impression was created that it was an organization without a center and without a hierarchy, when in fact it is quite the opposite. The human decision-making center was removed and a technological one placed under the premise that technology never fails.
The model, which still serves today for dAOs (the lowercase ‘d’ is intentional), is incompatible with the distributed architecture of the blockchain. First, because it centralized resources in a single fund, something centralized. And, in the long term, it generates a centralized management structure for this fund. Second, because it established governance by vote and, as we have seen with political radicalization, voting is not democracy, it is not inclusive and majority decision excludes, in the extreme hypothesis, 49.9% of people.
Today, existing dAOs repeat all these mistakes. Legislation, for example, treats them as joint ventures. This will require committees, councils, meritorious votes and mechanisms to correct the distortions of the electoral system and be accountable to the State. The fundraising success and the hack were huge facts, but how it was resolved and subsequent analysis was a disaster that held back the industry. Thankfully, it didn’t work out, as it would guide the formation of new dAOs for decades, putting the greatest opportunity for a more inclusive and distributed capitalism model at once.2017, Central Bank Survey – Marcos Sarres, CEO of GoLedger
Marcos Sarres, CEO of GoLedger.
I had several outstanding facts during my journey in the Blockchain world, but one of those facts made me make important technical decisions that made a big difference in the future. In 2017, the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) conducted a survey of the main licensed blockchain platforms existing at the time, including Hyperledger Fabric, Corda and Quorum.
After reading this research (dated in August of that year ) I realized the advantages that Blockchain could bring to the market, especially for the public sector, as a form of digital governance for processes involving a group of companies. In addition, the survey had the participation of Rafael Sarres, my brother, one of the people I most respect due to his knowledge and competence. And from this concept and idea, GoLedger was born, in order to provide reliable registration platforms using Blockchain technology.
Later I chose to use the Hyperledger Fabric platform as the basis of my work and development because it is completely open-source and has a consensus mechanism capable of bringing the performance and reliability needed to open up a large amount of records. The projects we developed for the Military Police of the State of São Paulo (PMESP) and the GoFabric solution in the list of strategic products by the Ministry of Defense, as well as projects with Hyperledger that governments outside the country are using, show the capacity of blockchain and Hyperleger in the public sector.2017, DeFi (Decentralized Finance) – Chaim Finizola, CGO of Credix
Chaim Finizola, Chief Growth Officer of Credix.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is one of the most significant blockchain innovations since the creation of bitcoin. Ethereum allowed different new applications in its protocol thanks to smart contracts. But it was only with the emergence of the Maker DAO loan protocol, at the end of 2017, that users were able to carry out other operations, in addition to sending money from A to B.
MakerDAO and its stablecoin Dai stablecoin laid the first building blocks for a new, open and public (non-permissioned) financial system, allowing users to issue an algorithmic stable currency worth a dollar and using digital assets as collateral. Thus, anyone could take out a loan without needing a central institution.
From there, many new DeFi applications began to copy the traditional finance TradFi applications: Compound Finance (loan), Uniswap (decentralized exchange), Balancer (automated portfolio management), Synthetix (generation and trading of synthetic assets), Yearn Finance (loan aggregator) and Nexus Mutual (decentralized insurance) are just a few examples.
Although DeFi has seen a huge rise in the crypto scene, to become popular it will need to undergo crucial changes. The need to pledge many assets as collateral (collateral), although correct given the volatility of digital currencies, has some limitations. Once non-blockchain (off-chain) assets can be used as collateral for DeFi, removing the need for on-chain deposits creates many more business opportunities. I believe this will be the next big event in crypto in 2022: connecting DeFi with real-world assets for unsecured applications like loans.2019, Facebook announces Libra – Claudia Mancini, Editor-in-Chief of Blocknews
Claudia Mancini, founder and editor-in-chief of Blocknews.
A few days ago, someone asked me if Facebook wants to take over the world. “I think so” is my answer to that question. In addition to having our data at hand – if you are a user of his networks – Mark Zuckerberg decided to create an international payments system with its own currency, getting as much beaten as possible by central banks and other financial and payment institutions.
Thus, in June 2019 it announced the Libra, a stable currency, and the Calibra, its digital wallet. It did this with a group that included giant companies and even competitors such as Visa and Mastercard. But, the outcry from regulators was such that many important companies – these two, for example – left the project. Only Zuckerberg didn’t give up, even though he made some changes to the original design of his then newest cryptographic dream.
Thus, Facebook showed that with blockchain, companies can have their currencies – not necessarily to dominate the world – and caused a rush of governments. In fact, this rush was accelerated with the announcement by China that it would launch its CBDC.
Libra is now Diem, in a communication action because the name was negatively marked. Calibra is now Novi, a wallet that went into testing last month – also under shouts from the US Congress.
At Convergence – The Global Blockchain Convention, in November 2019, Dante Disparte , then vice president and spokesman for the Libra Association (now Diem), heard harsh criticism of the project from all sides. But a representative of the European Central Bank (ECB) said what seemed to me the most sensible phrase in the discussion: “Looking only at Libra is like looking at a tree in a forest. There is much more to it”.
Therefore, governments, which were comfortably looking only at the coins they issued in paper, metal and electronic format and looked a bit distant at digital coins, had to better understand this movement of cryptocurrencies, corporate cryptographic coins and entered more in the game – even if to try to stop them, accelerating the studies of CBDCs.2020, Bitcoin liquidity – Daniela Von Hertwig Meyer, Marketing Director at Stratum
Daniela Von Hertwig Meyer, director of Stratum and ambassador for Nexo.
Bitcoin liquidity crisis? Never! Much was said about the ‘antifragility’ of bitcoin after the liquidity crisis of traditional assets in the crash we saw on stock exchanges around the world in 2020. As a result of the economic effects caused by the pandemic. The stock exchanges, which are open only on business days and at specific times, have gone through numerous circuit breakers, where trading is suspended for certain periods to avoid very sharp falls.
This does not happen with bitcoin and altcoins and it allowed people around the world to sell their assets whenever they wanted, with complete freedom and without any institutional intervention. This crisis gave relevance to bitcoin, as despite the sharp drop at that time, it showed its ‘antifragility’ in chaos. Crypto remained available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, while the so-called “traditional” assets suffered intervention in their trading at all times.
Thus, bitcoin started to be part of investment funds renowned as BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, to be part of assets in the balance sheets of companies listed on stock exchanges, such as MicroStrategy, and even used as a reserve for municipalities, see the city of Miami. This caused bitcoin to escalate to a dizzying high shortly thereafter, as it reaffirmed its mission of financial freedom.
In addition to 24/7 liquidity, this milestone, in my opinion, is one of the most important for bitcoin as it has shown the power of this crypto as a currency, not just as a speculative financial asset. I’m not surprised by the emergence of funds and ETFs and their availability by large banks and brokerages that used to turn up their noses at cryptocurrencies, in response to the demand of their clients after this event.2020, CBDC – Luiza Romero, EY blockchain consultant
Luiza Romero, EY blockchain consultant and professor at New York University (NYU).
To adapt to the digital economy and “compete” with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and stablecoins , central banks around the world are being “forced” to innovate in the way they issue and manage money today. This is how the idea of ​​digital currencies issued by central banks, or CBDCs ( Central Bank Digital Currency ) began to become a reality.
CBDC is different from cryptocurrencies, but a big similarity is the possibility of using blockchain technology and distributed logging in its architecture. The use of technology could be the differentiator in redesigning the way central banks interact with commercial banks and citizens. It has the potential to improve current infrastructure inefficiencies and vulnerabilities, enable rule programming to facilitate compliance , reduce the cost of printing/cash management, and securely create a globally interconnected payment system.
Bahamas was the first country to launch its CBDC in October 2021. Other countries such as Singapore, China and Nigeria are participating in pilot projects exploring how this technology can benefit the economy and make the currency system more efficient. This year, the Central Bank of Brazil also presented guidelines for the potential development of the digital real to be launched by 2024. In it, blockchai n has chances to be considered to provide the expected functionalities.
The exploitation of CBDCs has intensified recently and the progress of the blockchain/distributed registry has undoubtedly been a great ally to modernize the global economic ecosystem. But technology is only part of the equation. Central banks are still concerned with exhaustively analyzing the transnational and economic implications of this new paradigm shift.2021, Crypto ETFs – Roberta Antunes, Hashdex Growth Director
Roberta Antunes, Growth Director at Hashdex.
The impact of Ethereum even gave impetus to the creation of other Blockchains aimed at the corporate world, such as Corda, from r3, and Fabric, from Project Hyperledger, causing an increasingly wide movement not only of crypto-natives, but also of a market that, until then, equated Blockchain with Bitcoin, an asset they considered extremely exotic and almost impossible to classify.
ETFs (exchange index funds) were one of the great milestones in the crypto market, because they gave access to a portion of investors who were interested, but had a lot of friction to access the asset. Individuals were concerned about creating an exchange account, guarding their own asset and had no idea which asset to buy. There was also insecurity due to lack of knowledge and fear of blows. So, they began to understand that now they can invest even with currency volatility, because it is in an environment that they know and have the regulation that legitimizes investment. This made thousands of people in Brazil and around the world, who did not have access to cryptos, begin to have exposure to currencies.
Hashdex launched the world’s first cryptocurrency ETF in Bermuda last February. Then it was Canada and a few days later we launched in Brazil. Here we have 140,000 investors in Hash11. That’s more than a third of ETF investors on the stock exchange (B3) and shows how much room existed for a regulated crypto product. In addition, it opened space for institutional investors, because large investment funds that had great difficulty, including regulatory ones, to access cryptocurrency, now do so via the Brazilian stock exchange. Therefore, the indirect investment in crypto in retail is much bigger than people think.
Another big news was the approval of the first ETF (last month) in the USA, where since 2013 it had been requested by the Winklevoss brothers. The new chairman of the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) likes cryptos, but he was very afraid of price variation, of market manipulation, because the trading of assets takes place in an unregulated environment. It’s an incredible evolution because the world follows the American market. This successful ETF there will open doors for more ETFs in the US and the rest of the world. My long-term view is that everyone will invest in crypto.