THE FUTURE OF FINANCE
Guest Curator: Ric Edelman
Exhibit Description: This exhibit takes visitors on a journey from ancient ledgers to bitcoin mining and staking— with digital storytelling, physical artifacts and interactive experiences. Topics include blockchain technology, digital assets and tokenization. The gallery also features dozens of artifacts tracing the advances in financial technology and communications over the past two centuries.
Exhibit Highlights: Throughout history, technology has been used to improve the most fundamental of all financial tools: the ledger. This gallery features one of the Museum’ s most treasured artifacts— Alexander Hamilton’ s original ledger creating one of the nation’ s first federal budgets— and traces the history of ledgers to the present day with an ASIC bitcoin miner. Other highlights of this gallery include interactive touchscreen stations, where visitors are invited to explore the worlds of crypto and tokenization through games and simulations.
FEATURED OBJECTS
1. United States Budget, 1797
Collection of the Museum of American Finance Starting in 1792, the Treasury Department created yearly budgets showing all receipts and expenditures. These reports ran some 90 pages and were balanced to the penny. The page displayed in this exhibit shows the tariffs— or import taxes— collected at the various ports in Massachusetts in 1797. It is an early American example of a printed ledger— precursor to a blockchain ledger.
2. Western Union Edison Universal Stock Ticker, 1870s
Rodney G. Klein Collection, Museum of American Finance Invented in 1867 by Edward Calahan, the stock ticker used telegraph and later telephone systems to print abbreviated names of stocks and current trading prices on a strip of paper tape. In 1871, Thomas Edison improved upon Calahan’ s model by adding a second printing wheel— thereby significantly increasing its speed. While prices could be delayed on heavy trading days, the system vastly expanded the range of the market by enabling investors to obtain current stock price information without being close to an exchange.
3. Quotron Desk Unit, Early 1960s
Rodney G. Klein Collection, Museum of American Finance In 1960, Quotron was the first to provide stock prices electronically, rather than by ticker tape.
4. Early Version of the Pocket Quote Pro, 1980s
Rodney G. Klein Collection, Museum of American Finance Stock tickers lasted for almost a century, but only about 20 years after the first electronic quote terminals arrived, hand-held models like this were developed.
5. Bitmain Bitcoin Miner, 2013 WhatsMiner M30S ++ Bitcoin Miner, 2020
On loan from the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology These are examples of an early model and secondgeneration cryptocurrency mining computers.
Sponsored by:
18 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2026 | www. MoAF. org