Bram Cohen Announced BitTorrent App on July 2 2001

Bram Cohen posted a message to a peer-to-peer mailing list on July 2 2001 stating that his new app BitTorrent was now in working order. The mailing list founder replied asking what BitTorrent was. Cohen did not respond.

The Verge reported that Cohen had developed the app after leaving Mojo Nation, a startup that shut down in 2002. He had worked on swarming distribution technology there and released BitTorrent in July 2001 as a narrow tool for that function. Widely cited metrics showed BitTorrent accounting for half of peer-to-peer traffic and one-third of all internet traffic in 2004.

The Verge reported that the protocol continues to attract tens of millions of monthly users as of 2026. Cohen founded BitTorrent Inc. in 2004. The company raised 8.75 million dollars in 2005 and an additional 20 million dollars in 2006.

Paramount, and MGM before closing the store less than two years later. The Verge reported that the company laid off half its staff during a recapitalization after the closure. A former senior employee estimated the company moved an exabyte of data every month.

Major torrent sites emerged alongside the protocol. Suprnova.org launched in 2002 and attracted up to a million users a day before closing in 2004. The Pirate Bay was founded in Sweden in 2003. Swedish authorities raided the site in 2006, and its three cofounders were sentenced in April 2009 to one-year prison terms and ordered to pay damages.

The Denis.Stalker.H3Q.com tracker, run by three German hackers, handled around 100 million daily peers and one million files per day at its peak. Berlin police raided one operator's apartment and confiscated equipment, but the case was later dismissed. A 2014 study estimated torrent sites generated 114 million dollars in ad revenue that year.