Crypto Stories
Meet the people who built crypto networks and brought them to new audiences. Follow each story back to the papers, interviews and public records behind it.
Bitcoin · 2010–2025
How Herbert Sim became The Bitcoin Man
A drawing, a domain name and a gold necklace trace how a Singapore fashion publisher took Bitcoin to a different audience.
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Ethereum Classic · 2016
The block where Ethereum became two histories
At block 1,920,000, operators faced a decision that the code could implement but could never make for them.
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Litecoin · 2011
The detail Charlie Lee held back before Litecoin could start
Publishing the mining software early created a problem. Someone might use the head start to mine the real chain.
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Uniswap · 2017–2018
The exchange Hayden Adams built after losing his job
A mechanical engineer’s first Ethereum project posed a practical question: who supplies the other side of a trade?
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Solana · 2017–2018
Anatoly Yakovenko’s clock for strangers
Solana’s early design began with a problem familiar to anyone comparing logs from two different machines.
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Filecoin · 2020
How Filecoin turned a storage promise into something testable
A customer can check a download today. How does a network check that a provider kept the file through the months in between?
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Bitcoin · 2008
The email that introduced Bitcoin
Satoshi Nakamoto asked a mailing list to consider a payment system in which strangers could settle a dispute about who spent first.
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Ethereum · 2013–2015
Why Vitalik Buterin wanted a programmable blockchain
A thought experiment about a savings account helps explain the leap from Bitcoin scripts to Ethereum’s shared programming environment.
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Algorand · 2017
Silvio Micali and the committee nobody could name in advance
Algorand grew from a question about voting. Could a network choose its next committee without handing an attacker a list of targets?
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