Block by Block
Blockchain history told through the blocks where something broke — scalability ceilings, governance failures, distress, and moments that forced new directions, permanent or temporary.
Blockchains fundamentally are incredibly simple. You stick a bunch of transactions into a 'block', and you stick that block on the end of a chain of previous blocks. We come to consensus on which of those chains is the canonical chain, and voila - the future of finance.
Their beauty and wonder lies in their permissionlessness, censorship-resistance, and immutability. And it is the latter that I have found so fascinating over the years.
In theory, anybody, in the entire world, can do anything they want, to any block, and leave a permanent mark that will forever be auditable via a validator, an RPC, a block explorer.
I know it sounds mundane - but it's beyond fascinating. Never before has there been a decentralised, verifiable source of truth. Historical writing is often disputed, legal contracts are obscured, bank ledgers are overwritten. Not blockchains. Enjoy.
18 blocks · navigate with j/k keys
The Genesis Block
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
The first Bitcoin block was mined on January 3, 2009. Its coinbase data contained a headline from that morning - a mockery of the financial order that would later be lovingly known as TradFi. The beginnings of a better system; the beginnings of a new world order.
What can I say that hasn't been said a million times already. I find it so fascinating that Satoshi had the foresight to include this headline in the first block, no less on the actual day of the headline itself. Had they been waiting for something like this to launch the genesis block? Are there other non-canonical chains with unencoded genesis blocks that died?
I don't think they could have known the historical relevance that it would have - how could they. But my god is it cool.
First Peer-to-Peer Transaction
On January 12 2009, 10 days after Genesis, Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney. The first truly digitally native peer-to-peer transaction of a store of value. These were the first ever spent coins, sent to first person other than Satoshi to actually download and run the network. Of course, this has long been used to speculate on the identity of the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. It happened to test whether the network could transfer value between participants and record that transfer on-chain without relying on a bank or payment processor.
The first of what is estimated to now be >200B peer-to-peer transactions obviously makes the list. I go back and forth with my Bitcoin maxi friends on whether this block is more important than the Genesis Block, which produced 50 unspendable BTC - arguably quite uninteresting (encoded statement aside). This block forms the foundation of everything we've ever done since.
RIP Hal Finney.
Strange block 74,638
Strange block 74,638 was flagged by Jeff Garzik, where a transaction minted 184,467,440,737 BTC. Within 5.5 hours, Satoshi had the soft fork live and declared 'the good block chain has overtaken the bad block chain'.
It really is fascinating to watch the discourse today when things go wrong. People love to hate on the coordination of Solana developers in the Discord patching validators, but how different is that really to what has clearly always been happening?. The speed and scale at which they operate is actually astounding. My takeaway is honestly just that people love to hate, and forget what it looks like to operate at the limits of technological novelty. Kudos to Gavin Andresen, Jeff Garzik, Satoshi, and all developers who are still building in public.
The First Halving
Bitcoin block subsidy fell from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. BTC entering circulation halved and we saw the first true test of a novel immutable monetary policy. Some miners went offline, Difficulty adjusted, and on we continued. Code is law (kind of).
``` int64 GetBlockSubsidy(int nHeight) { int64 nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;
// Subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks, which occurs approximately every 4 years nSubsidy >>= (nHeight / 210000);
return nSubsidy; } ```
Up until this point, Bitcoin and its scarcity were really just an experiment - written in code, believed in by early adopters, but nothing that interesting. Then block 210,000 arrived, the subsidy dropped exactly as promised, and the network just kept moving.
That, to me, is what makes this block so important. This is the introduction of what remains today the true monetary policy of scarcity. Not scarcity as a speculation, or scarcity as a marketing line, but scarcity as something credibly enforced by the system itself. No committee meeting, no central bank, no debate - just the chain doing exactly what it said it would do.
There is something so clean about that. The halving is one of the purest expressions of why Bitcoin matters at all.
First Contract Deployed on Ethereum
August 7, 2015, the first contract was deployed on Ethereum. Just over a week after genesis, the network had already moved beyond simply existing and into being used for what made it different in the first place: executing code on-chain. This block sets the stage for everything we know and love about smart contracts to-date.
This block pre-dates the famous "Greeter" contract deployed 12 minutes later, though funnily enough that one ran out of gas.
This is the block where Ethereum really begins for me. Genesis matters, obviously, but genesis is still just the network turning on. This is the point where somebody actually used the thing for the reason it existed at all.
It is hard to overstate how strange and radical that idea was at the time. Bitcoin had already shown that you could maintain a decentralised ledger of value. Ethereum was claiming you could do the same for arbitrary logic. Block 48,643 is the first tiny proof that this was not just theory.
And from there, everything else follows. Tokens, NFTs, DeFi, DAOs, rollups, bridges, exploits, governance wars - all of it starts with the first moment someone put code on-chain and watched the network agree to run it.
The DAO Exploit & Subsequent Emergency Fork
A vulnerability in The DAO contract allowed an attacker to repeatedly withdraw funds before the contract updated its internal balance, draining around 3.6 million ETH into a child DAO. It was the first major exploit in Ethereum history and the first real decision point for Ethereum's social contract, culminating in the emergency fork at block 1,920,000 to fork away the hack.
I often wonder whether Ethereum would be what it is today if this never happened. Vitalik later said he did not regret the decision to fork, but did regret the social environment around it - especially how people who opposed the fork were made to feel unwelcome or morally suspect. I think that captures this moment perfectly, but I also think it genuinely changed the direction of our building permanently. Any fork, soft- or hard-, will ALWAYS reference this; "well if Ethereum can do it, why can't we!" Not a hot take in any way, but I doubt Ethereum will never hard-fork ever again. Having said that, a Circle/Tether collapse could lead to a divide between the purists and the 'others'. Let's hope we never get there.
CryptoKitties
I cannot find the first actual mint yet, so if you know it please submit it here. But block 4,605,167 marks the moment CryptoKitties made Ethereum's scaling limits impossible to ignore: if a game about breeding cartoon cats could clog the world computer, a global financial system was nowhere close.
I mostly like this block because it is funny. It was one of the first clear demonstrations that you really could do almost anything you wanted on this world computer, but it was also a reminder of how far we still were from the future of finance.
I also like it because I have been to DCNTRL in Vancouver, and they tell stories about the developers sitting in the cubby underneath the stairs when they "took out Ethereum." That is such a perfect early-crypto story: absurd, slightly embarrassing, and genuinely important.
London Hard Fork (EIP-1559)
The London hard fork activated EIP-1559 in August 2021. It changed Ethereum's fee market by introducing a base fee that is burned and a separate tip for block producers, making transaction pricing more predictable and tying network usage directly to ETH supply.
This is one of those blocks where Ethereum tried to introduce better monetary policy and the beginnings of ETH as ultrasound money. Before EIP-1559, fees were just paid through to miners. After it, part of every transaction was burned, which meant network demand started feeding back into ETH scarcity itself.
I think that shift matters more than most people gave it credit for at the time. It was not just a UX improvement or a cleaner fee market, it was Ethereum making a fairly explicit statement about what ETH was for and how the system should work under load.
The 10M DAI Governance Override
A certain user accidentally sent $10m DAI to the dead address. In theory, those funds were dead. But through the kindness of the MakerDAO, and some crafty Governance Pause Proxy fun, the user received their funds back on Ethereum.
This was one of the first instances of precedence being set not only for L2's and the ability to control their state, but also of a DAO as significant as MakerDAO coordinating to, in some ways, revert state.
This block, and sequence of events, is fascinating all round. If you can do this, are funds on an L2 even really REAL funds? If you can do this, are L2s centralised? If you can do this, is MakerDAO centralised? If Kain can do this, can I do this?
So many questions that I think would yield different answers depending on who you asked.
My advice? Don't try your luck yeeting millions of dollars to the dead address.
First LayerZero Message
On March 15, 2022, LayerZero's first live message was sent in Ethereum block 14,392,628. The transaction was actually seven messages in one call, and it marked the first real on-chain proof that cross-chain messaging was going to be viable moving forward. LayerZero now dominates the interop space, and the market would be years behind without their infrastructure.
Perhaps more notably, the packet of this message contained the letters "G I N" - thereby, completing the internet.
Did you really think you'd get through a Lamps essay with a LayerZero transaction? Not so lucky, anon.
Having worked day in, day out, on this for years - I truly believe our industry would be set back many years without the blood, sweat and tears that went into solving interoperability. It is an incredibly hard problem to solve, and the ability to move assets & data between chains has allowed the proliferation of new chains, VMs, and exploration that ultimately will lead to wide spread adoption.
Probably my current favourite block.
Nomad Bridge Hack
The key Nomad block is 14,629,758, where upgrade transaction 0x99662dacfb4b963479b159fc43c2b4d048562104fe154a4d0c2519ada72e50bf set the trusted root to `0x00`. That mistake later made arbitrary messages appear valid, and once the exploit path was known the hack turned into a copy-paste free-for-all as others replayed the same calldata with their own addresses, over and over again.
One of the many reminders we've had as an industry on the importance of immutability.
Did you really think you'd get through a Lamps essay without a bridge hack? Not so lucky, anon.
This was neither the first, nor the last, nor the largest, bridge hack. But it was hugely significant for the industry as a whole, and for me personally with all the things we built at LayerZero and Stargate.
Such a wild situation that this exploit played out over hours and hours, the first exploit at 9:32pm, and some still pulling out DAI at 11:50pm.
It's also such a perfect crypto artifact. Permissionlessness cuts both ways, and sometimes that reveals a pretty messy ending, with 'normies' getting the worst of it.
Otherside NFT Mint Congestion
Yuga Labs' Otherdeed NFT mint generated a huge spike in Ethereum gas fees on May 1, 2022. Minters competed to buy the land NFTs, with some users paying over $10,000 in gas, just to mint the NFTs. Most importantly, gas prices did not return to baseline for ~12 hours, leading to some concerns of censorship. Additionally, Yuga ended up decided to refund all users who paid fees on failed transactions.
This mint was when I first came up with the idea for this essay. I remember participating, paying $7,500 in ETH to mint two random NFTs. I remember thinking how impossible it was that this could be the future.
It was also the time when the discourse around app-specific chains, and branded chains REALLY took off - shaping the direction of Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum (stack), Optimism (stack), zkSync (stack). I am of the strong believe that this moment truly altered the course of Ethereum forever. The discourse and disagreement that followed led to a real confusion in the Ethereum ecosystem for years to come.
Funnily enough, Apechain shipped as an Arbitrum Orbit LAYER THREE, in October 2024. Imagine suggesting that in 2022.
Terra/Luna Halt
On May 13, 2022, Terra validators halted the chain at block 7,607,789. The halt was too late to prevent the already spiralling LUNA collapse, and the collapse in LUNA's price had made governance attacks cheap enough that validators chose to stop the network rather than keep producing blocks through the death spiral.
This is one of the clearest reminders that blockchains are only immutable right up until the people running them decide the situation is too broken to continue. In terms of actual blocks produced in the 2021 Crypto Cycle, this is probably one of the most memorable. Do Kwon, and LFG, had collapsed - GCR and, somehow, Algod, had won. Millions of people burnt, and the bodies didn't really float to the surface until many months later.
The Merge
The Merge, before The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge... you get the point. Proof of Work to Proof of Stake on September 15, 2022. A true technological feat as the execution layer continued running while block production moved to the Beacon Chain validator set. The Merge was necessary to lay the technical foundations for everything that was to come, aligning Ethereum's roadmap around Proof of Stake and rollup-centric scaling.
The Merge was one of the most underappreciated technical achievements in crypto. A $200 billion network changed its consensus engine while running, truly (re)building the plane engine as you're flying it.
I personally remember The Merge for two reasons; it was an impressive feat of social coordination to get enough validators to perform such a delicate migration simultaneously, and it moved all conversation towards L2's and their roll in 'scaling Ethereum'. Which is very interesting in hindsight.
Highly Profitable Trading Strategy - Mango Markets
On October 11, 2022, the Mango attacker manipulated MNGO prices to borrow and withdraw roughly $110 million from the protocol. The exploit then continued: an 'anonymous' governance attack, with tokens acquired through the trade, to vote on the terms of their own settlement.
By this point, everyone felt over-stimulated and jaded - I barely remember caring about the insanity of this exploit at the time. To the extent that Crypto Twitter just immediately meme'd `profitable trading strategy` and continue to use it whenever something slightly amiss happens.
Obviously what was most significant about this block & moment were the events that followed; Avi's admission, attempt at using "code is law", and his ultimate conviction. (And the overturning). (But also the child pornography).
Hu Lezhi Burns ETH to the Dead Address
On February 17, 2025, a wallet associated with Hu Lezhi sent 500 ETH to the zero address and embedded a long accusation-filled manifesto in Ethereum transaction data. It was part of a wider series of burns, and donations to Wikileaks, that used permanent state as a last-resort publishing medium.
This is one of the strangest things I have ever seen to be honest. It is disturbing, sad, and a very sharp reminder that permanent state does not just preserve triumph or finance or coordination, but also preserves distress.
I keep coming back to it because it is such a literal example of what these systems are for at their most basic level. If somebody wants to leave a message in a place that is hard to erase, the chain will take it, whether or not the rest of us know what to do with it.
I have absolutely no idea whether the things Hu Lezhi was alleging are true, nor do I think I want to know. Regardless, there is nothing that you, nor I, nor `bosses of Kuande Investment` can do anything about this relic.
Attempted $50M USDT-to-AAVE Swap / Titan Tip
On March 12, 2026, a transaction in block 24,643,151 swapped 50,432,688 aEthUSDT for just 327.24 aEthAAVE on CoWSwap. Moooooo. The user allegedly used their mobile phone to accept the terms of the swap, and lost 99.9% of their funds.
Beyond this, this was the largest ever tip paid to a block builder, with $34m in ETH going to Titan.
I love blocks like this because they are such brutally honest artifacts. Whatever somebody thought was going to happen here, the chain recorded what actually happened instead, and it was catastrophic in a way that no post-hoc explanation can really soften.
It also feels like a very modern, yet historic, crypto story. Routing, proposer-builder separation, private orderflow & solvers, weird execution environments, and a trade so absurd that it immediately becomes public folklore.
Ethereum Foundation Mandate Enshrined On-Chain
On March 13, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published its new mandate and then anchored it in an Ethereum transaction in block 24,648,763. Not really a technical event but a deliberate use of permanent state to make an institutional promise legible and durable.
I suspect people will keep doing this forever. If you want to make a promise feel more real, one of the most obvious things you can do now is put it somewhere public, timestamped, and hard to edit away later.
That is what I like about this block. It is not some giant technical breakthrough, just another small proof that chains have become a place where people go to leave durable signals for other humans to find - and I like that the Ethereum Foundation knows that about Ethereum. Kudos.
Four ways to read the timeline
Some blocks matter because they permanently changed the story of crypto. These are the moments people still reference years later when they try to explain how we got from a niche experiment to a global financial and technical movement.
Some blocks matter because they introduced or tested a new technical reality. A monetary policy was enforced, a contract was deployed, a chain hit its limits, or an architecture proved it could survive real use.
Blocks are not neutral containers. They preserve headlines, bugs, hacks, experiments, and traces of the people who used them. They are historical artifacts as much as they are units of computation.
Some blocks are here because they are simply too weird, too dramatic, or too revealing to ignore. Crypto is full of ideology and infrastructure, but it is also full of chaos, personality, and moments that are just unbelievably fun to revisit.