Cryptography for confidential payments has been used since 1990 in the DigiCash system of David Chaum, whose company went bankrupt in 1998. This payment system was centralized.

For the first time, the term "cryptocurrency" began to be used after the appearance of the Bitcoin payment system, which was developed in 2009 by a person or group of people under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto (identity as of December 2018 has not yet been established). The term “cryptocurrency” became widespread after the publication on April 20, 2011 in Forbes of an article by Andy Greenberg entitled “Crypto Currency” (“Cryptographic Currency”).
Later forks appeared: Namecoin (decentralized DNS for registration within the .bit domain zone), Litecoin (uses scrypt hashing), PPCoin (uses a hybrid proof-of-work / proof-of-stake mechanism that does not have an upper emission limit), Novacoin (similar to PPCoin, but uses scrypt) and many others.