On October 12, 2009, Martti Malmi sold 5,050 BTC to NewLibertyStandard for $5.02 via PayPal — the first known exchange of Bitcoin for fiat currency.
One week earlier, on October 5, 2009, NewLibertyStandard had published the first-ever Bitcoin exchange rate ($1 = 1,309.03 BTC) and launched a rudimentary exchange website. Malmi’s motivation was to help bootstrap the market: someone had to be the first seller for a market to exist. Malmi had proposed an exchange service of his own to Satoshi that July, but it did not exist yet: on October 8 he wrote to Satoshi that NewLibertyStandard had just begun trading bitcoins for dollars, and that making an exchange service first had “seemed a bit premature for the time being.”
Malmi, a 20-year-old computer science student at the Helsinki University of Technology, had been Satoshi’s closest collaborator since May 2009. He started Bitcoin’s Linux port, built the bitcoin.org website, wrote the FAQ, and founded the BitcoinTalk forums.
It was the first price anyone actually paid for bitcoin: approximately $0.001 per BTC, set against the cost-based rate NewLibertyStandard had published a week before. The three other exchanges that opened before Mt. Gox, and the advice Satoshi gave instead of running one, are traced in the exchanges before Mt. Gox.
Unlike Laszlo Hanyecz’s Bitcoin Pizza Day purchase roughly seven months later — the first known purchase of a physical good with Bitcoin — Malmi’s sale was purely an exchange-rate transaction, converting bitcoin into fiat currency rather than trading it for goods.
At 2025 prices exceeding $100,000 per BTC, those 5,050 bitcoins would be worth over $500 million.
