The revolution that would rewrite finance started with a trip to a Swiss registry office.

On July 14, 2014, Vitalik Buterin and his co-founders filed the paperwork to register Stiftung Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation, as a nonprofit in Zug, Switzerland, a date still on record in the Swiss commercial registry. No press release, no fireworks, just a foundation charter tucked into the filings of a small canton locals now call Crypto Valley. It’s a wonderfully mundane origin for a project that would eventually spawn DeFi, NFTs, and a trillion-dollar asset class. The founders picked Switzerland specifically because its foundation law let them build something that belonged to no one and everyone, a structure that still shapes how Ethereum governs itself.

Eight days later, the foundation launched its Ether crowdsale, pulling in $18.3 million in bitcoin over 42 days, the second-biggest crowdfund on the internet at the time. The foundation Buterin registered with a handful of signatures now stewards a network processing billions in value daily. Not bad for a filing that probably took an afternoon.

That’s today in crypto history. See you tomorrow.