2009-2017, from Bitcoin to ICOs

On 22 May 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid for two pizzas with ten thousand bitcoins. It was the first time Satoshi Nakamoto’s currency had been exchanged for a good from the real world. In the autumn of 2021, those ten thousand bitcoins would have been worth more than six hundred million dollars. Every year the community celebrates this Pizza Day with amused affection. For our story, the anecdote has another significance. From the very first year, the question of the link between the blockchain and the real world was posed in its most elementary form. What remained was to turn a digital entry into a thing.

The period from 2009 to 2017 is that of the pioneers. It begins with a handful of enthusiasts trading bitcoins on forums and ends with a speculative bubble worth several billion dollars. In between, almost all the ideas underpinning today’s RWA were formulated, often clumsily, sometimes brilliantly, and several times at the wrong moment.

Colouring bitcoins

Very early on, a few inventive minds noticed that Bitcoin’s blockchain could be used for something other than transferring bitcoins. Since each unit of the currency has a traceable history, from transaction to transaction, certain fractions of bitcoin could be marked so that they represented something else: a share, a bond, a property title, a voucher. The technique was called colored coins. Several founding texts circulated from 2012, one signed by Yoni Assia, the future founder of eToro, and another by Meni Rosenfeld.