The Year’s Best Cryptocurrency Stories

We have reviewed our mostly widely read and provocative cryptocurrency stories of 2020 in search for the seven that best illuminate this wild year. Here are our top reads.

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As part of the Blockchain 50 list, former Forbes magazine editor Bill Baldwin co-wrote a deep look at how cryptocurrency exchange and Blockchain 50 member Coinbase became the first bitcoin firm to receive status as a Visa principal member, meaning it can now issue its own credit cards.

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In February, just before 2020 turned into a nonstop flurry of pandemic updates and presidential turmoil, a team of nine Forbes reporters and editors published our second annual Blockchain 50 list of the billion-dollar companies taking blockchain and cryptocurrency seriously.

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In July, we broke the story that the same week Brock Pierce had announced his presidential candidacy, a New York court had said the state’s attorney general could investigate a group of companies associated with him that helped create the $10 billion cryptocurrency tether.

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In August, as China ramped up efforts to implement the first large-scale example of a central bank using blockchain technology for a national currency, we took a deep dive into how one company that prints much of the world’s currency, Giesecke & Devrient, was adopting blockchain to bring its clients into the next generation of money.

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In October, Forbes research director for digital assets Steven Ehrlich published a detailed refutation of the increasingly common argument that China and the U.S. were starting another Cold War in their battle for monetary dominance. Instead, he likens the battle to an insurgency.

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As bitcoin’s price was flirting with an all-time high of nearly $20,000, we broke the news that Visa had partnered with cryptocurrency startup Circle, which has raised $271 million to build a new kind of money using the ethereum blockchain that moves as fast and as easily as sending an email.

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As the year came to a close, bitcoin broke the $20,000 milestone in typical form—teasing the number for weeks and then crushing it by more than $3,000 in a single day. While the variable that led to the explosion will long be debated, the accomplishment set the stage for a 2021 to remember.

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