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, a 20-year-old computer science student at the Helsinki University of Technology, had been Satoshi’s closest collaborator since May 2009. He ported Bitcoin to Linux, built the bitcoin.org website, wrote the FAQ, and founded the BitcoinTalk forums. He was the first to sell — not for profit, but to prove that Bitcoin could function as a medium of exchange.
The transaction established Bitcoin’s first real-world price: approximately $0.001 per BTC.
[At 2025 prices exceeding $100,000 per BTC, those 5,050 bitcoins would be worth over $500 million.]