2017 appeared to be crucial in the history of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies development. It was eventful right from the beginning: cryptocurrency adoption or ban in various countries, ICO breakneck advance, a sharp increase of cryptocurrencies and total cap, etc. Let’s cast back to the beginning of this year and see the changes in the global crypto market throughout 2017.

Bitcoin became an official payment means in Japan

On April 1, 2017, the Japanese government came to be the first to accept bitcoin as official money equal to other currencies. The country primary currency remains yen while bitcoin is regulated in the same way foreign currencies are. This move became a milestone in cryptocurrency rocketing.

According to the Fuji Chimera Research Institute, in 2015, cryptocurrency turnover in Japan was $1.67 bn, and it would rise tenfold by 2020. Taking into account the sharp increase of cryptocurrencies after the new governmental regulation, this prediction is likely to come true.

U. S. financial regulator equated ICO and IPO

On July 25, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decided the status of ICO. Right from this date, the American jurisdiction claims initial token offering and initial public offering (IPO) the same mechanisms. Thus, all released tokens, issuers, and investors will be regulated by the existing legislation regardless of what they use to buy securities: fiat or cryptocurrency.

Companies that establish assets on blockchain are to register deals. If not, the sanctions will be imposed. Moreover, cryptocurrency exchanges were also obliged to register.

Bitcoin split

On August 1, 2017, a hard fork was conducted on the block 478558 of the bitcoin chain. The world met the first block of the new chain called Bitcoin Cash.

There have been many talks on hard fork of its supporters and opponents. However, this idea became reality. It was a mining pool ViaBTC that generated a block for the split. By the way, ViaBTC had always been for hard fork as a way of increasing the speed of transactions.

The first Bitcoin Cash was traded at $293.88. By the end of the year, the rate went up. Many members of the crypto community explain this phenomenon more by its relation to bitcoin than its boosting popularity.

China prohibited ICO

This announcement appeared the most shocking during this eventful year. On September 4, the Chinese government officially banned companies under the Chinese jurisdiction from ICO investing. ICO was declared illegal.

What is more, companies that finished ICO were to return all the collected funds to the investors.

Tezos and Filecoin raised the record-breaking amount by ICO

On July 14, 2017, the company Tezos set a world record publishing collected ICO funds – $232 mn compared to the previous one by Bancor – $150 mn. The secret of the Swiss Tezos lies in an almost unattainable upper limit of the proposal: they established a two-thousand-transaction block.

Unfortunately, Tezos celebrated the top position only for a while. In two months, on 7 September, the Californian project Filecoin owned by Protocol Labs took the first place. The project was created as far as 2014 to store data in IPFS, an HTTP successor. ICO Filecoin total amount of investments outperformed Tezos by $25 mn reaching $257 mn.

Bitcoin rate surged over $7000

The state of things we have now should be regarded in terms of psychology. On November 2, the average weighted exchange rate of the most popular cryptocurrency surpassed $7000. The rate was near this amount on the basic exchanges Bitfinex and Bitstamp. Here, bitcoin was traded for $6966 and $6961 correspondingly. However, the average rate set an all-time record.

It is a South Korean exchange Bithumb where bitcoin surged over $7300, which is the maximum rate. At that moment, the total cap of bitcoin reached $117.3 bn with a daily turnover of $3.5 bn.