Bitcoin launched in 2009 with a whitepaper, a pseudonymous author nobody has identified, and a first transaction of ten thousand coins for two pizzas. Whatever you think of what came afterwards, that origin story is genuinely one of the strangest in modern finance.

The symbols became recognisable much faster than the technology became understood. An orange circle with a crossed B, and a stylised octahedron for Ethereum - both now instantly legible to people who could not explain a hash function under pressure.

What's interesting from a design view is how deliberately those marks were built to look institutional. The Bitcoin logo borrows the visual grammar of a currency symbol, which was a very effective piece of positioning for something with no institution behind it.

The culture around it produced its own vocabulary, its own memes and a truly enormous amount of screenshot-based drama.

This collection covers the major coins and their marks. Not financial advice, obviously.