For its 2023 edition, Guinness World Records welcomes Bitcoin (BTC) and non-fungible tokens (NFT) under a new category called “Cryptomania”. The iconic record book will trace the history of Bitcoin and explain its various mechanisms, while also showcasing milestones in the ecosystem, a new marker of the general public’s interest in these assets.
Bitcoin enters the Guinness World Records
For the first time in history, the iconic Guinness World Records has added Bitcoin (BTC), non-fungible tokens (NFT) and various blockchain milestones to its list of official records for its 2023 edition. These appear through a category specially created for the occasion, dubbed “Cryptomania”.
This new edition, which has been available for purchase since last month, is a testament to the prominent place that Bitcoin and the blockchain world now occupy in the contemporary world. The event is all the more notorious as it appears in the middle of the crypto winter, which seems to be going on for a long time.
As for Bitcoin, the king of cryptocurrencies is listed as the “First Decentralized Cryptocurrency”, and is accompanied by the history of its creation, from its genesis with the evocation of the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, to the leading position it occupies today in the digital asset world. Its intrinsic mechanism, the proof of work (PoW), also benefits from an explanation for the readers of the reference book of international records.
We can read there, for example:
“The Bitcoin network solves the problem of double spending through a “trustless” mechanism, which does not require third-party verification of transactions (e.g., banks), and it does so through validators (i.e., miners, in PoW).”
Many categories present
We’ll also note the presence of NFTs in the Guinness World Records, a rather logical appearance given the considerable growth that this type of asset has been able to encounter, particularly over the course of 2021, both in terms of the prominent collections that have made the news, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), and in terms of the various use cases for the technology and its inherent metadata.
CryptoPunks were notably mentioned in the record book as the “most expensive collection”, due to the sale of CryptoPunk #5822 for a whopping 8,000 Ethers, or $23.7 million at the time of purchase last February by businessman Deepak Thapliyal.
We will also note the presence of fan tokens, digital tokens designed for sports fans and introduced by the blockchain company Socios.com. The Manchester City club token, for example, has been cited as the most expensive token in this category, printing a market capitalization of over $47 million as of March 24, 2022.
In an interview with our Cointelegraph colleagues, a spokesperson for Guiness World Records said that these various topics are now in the air and likely to be of interest to readers. He adds:
“We will be watching this space with interest over the next few years as the technologies behind crypto develop and find a wider range of applications.”
