Bitcoin’s white paper marks its 18th anniversary Saturday, as the asset’s role in finance extends beyond payments to include a BlackRock exchange-traded fund valued at about $66 billion.
The 2008 document proposed peer-to-peer electronic payments designed to operate outside banks and any central authority.
Several publicly traded companies now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Institutional activity now includes stablecoins, tokenization and blockchain infrastructure alongside Bitcoin.
On one day in October 2025, liquidations reached about $19 billion. During the 2022 crypto winter, digital-asset market value fell by more than $2 trillion.
One figure tracks forced closures of leveraged positions over a day; the other describes a decline in total digital-asset market value.
