Did you know that Bitcoin isn’t the first cryptocurrency ?

American cryptographer named David Chaum published a legendary article called “Traceable Email, Reverse Addresses and Digital Aliases” in 1981.

In this article, Chaum described an anonymous digital payment system. In 1989, Chaum created a functioning digital currency DigiCash based on his protocol. It was a revolutionary technology that gave the world the concept of “blind signatures”.

Blind signatures conceal the content of a message and use a combination of public and private passwords to confirm a transaction. Today, this concept is used in well-known cryptocurrencies in the form of public keys.

This technology was way ahead of it's time as DigiCash Inc. declared bankruptcy in 1998 and subsequently sold its assets to eCash Technologies.

Many of DigiCash's innovations laid the groundwork for the development of blockchain technology in the 2000s.