For years the great banks called bitcoin a toy, a bubble, a fraud. Then, slowly, the doors of the old counting-house creaked open. In December 2017, Chicago's exchanges began trading bitcoin futures. In August 2020, a software company called MicroStrategy began spending its cash on bitcoin, and kept buying.

In April 2021, the exchange Coinbase listed its shares on the Nasdaq. Crypto was no longer only for rebels and hobbyists. It had walked up the marble steps.

For a decade, firms asked America's regulators to allow an exchange-traded fund holding real bitcoin — and for a decade they were refused. On 10 January 2024, the SEC finally approved eleven spot bitcoin ETFs, and the next morning they began to trade.

Now anyone with a retirement account could own bitcoin as easily as a share of a company, without holding a single key. Money poured in faster than almost any fund launch in history. Ether ETFs followed on 23 July 2024.

On 5 December 2024, one bitcoin was worth more than $100,000 for the first time — the same coin that, in 2010, was worth a thin sliver of a pizza. Early miners who had kept their coins, and forgotten ones who had lost their keys, both became legends.

Then nations came calling. On 6 March 2025, the President of the United States signed an order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, to be filled with bitcoin the government had seized from criminals. Coins taken from thieves were now kept like gold in a vault.

Every frontier town gets its sheriff. Regulators around the world spent years deciding which old rules fit this new money. In July 2023, a US judge ruled in the long case against Ripple that its XRP token, sold to the public on exchanges, was not by itself a security — a landmark for the whole industry.

The European Union wrote a single rulebook, MiCA, fully in force from 30 December 2024, letting licensed firms serve customers across all its member states. Clear rules brought caution, paperwork — and the confidence of banks that had waited at the edge of town.

The newest alchemy is not turning lead into gold, but turning everything into tokens. Tokenization writes ownership of real things — government bonds, money-market funds, shares, even buildings — into the blockchain notebook, where they can move at any hour, in small slices, to anyone.

In March 2024, the giant asset manager BlackRock launched BUIDL, a tokenized fund on Ethereum holding US Treasury bills. Banks, exchanges and trading apps followed. The counting-house and the notebook, once rivals, were beginning to write in the same book.