Who sold the “Bitcoin Burger” to Trump?
When Thomas Pacchia first came to Donald. When the Trump campaign proposed PubKey, a Bitcoin-themed bar, as a campaign site, the response was exactly what Pacchia expected: “What is a Bitcoin Pub?”
Last Wednesday, Trump stopped by PubKey on his way to a rally on Long Island and used Bitcoin to buy a burger at the bar, marking the first transaction in history for a U.S. (former) president to use Bitcoin.
Thomas Pacchia, owner of PubKey Bar
When Pacchia started PubKey two years ago, he envisioned the West Village bar, located a few blocks near Washington Square Park, as a civic bar. He wants his bar to be a place where people can discuss monetary policy and politics over a beer, just as the Founding Fathers did 250 years ago.
So a surprise visit from a future president didn't surprise him. PubKey has hosted politicians like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the past, and Pacchia has invited other presidential candidates, including Kamala Trump. Harris.
However, the details of Trump's visit were even more shocking. Pacchia, who learned of the incident only a week before his visit, worked four hours a day with the Secret Service to plan the reception, including covering the skylights and placing snipers nearby. "It's crazy," Pacchia told Fortune a day after Trump's visit as bar staff worked to get back to normal business.
From Fidelity Mafia to Bitcoin Burger
Pacchia is not a typical Manhattan bar owner. A former lawyer, in 2015 he became the first outside employee with Bitcoin expertise at financial services giant Fidelity. As Fidelity moved deeper into cryptocurrency under Chief Executive Abigail Johnson, Pacchia helped build out the structure of Fidelity's digital assets business, including its custody and trading platform and early iterations of its mining operations.
While Pacchia is currently focused on PubKey, which is about to open a new store in Washington, D.C., and will expand to other cities with financial support from the Winklevoss brothers; he remains active in the cryptocurrency industry. Pacchia is serving on the board of directors of Stronghold Digital Mining and consulting for Luxor, another Bitcoin mining company.
Pacchia used to live a few blocks from PubKey, which was then a bar called Formerly Crow's: "an epic, quintessential New York speakeasy," he says. He would host parties with friends to talk about Bitcoin, which he called Crypto at the Crow. When Formery Crow's closed during the pandemic, Pacchia decided to start PubKey.
He teamed up with two experienced restaurateurs and a former Eleven Madison Park chef to design a menu of burgers, hot dogs and cocktails that would appeal to neighborhood residents and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
Even though PubKey’s decor is Bitcoin-themed, it still attracts a wide variety of customers. Last November, Pacchia noticed a couple at the end of the bar who looked like they had just finished a long workday. He quietly walked over to chat with them and they asked about this strange subject (Bitcoin).
When he told them about PubKey’s Bitcoin ethos, they looked shocked, “Are you kidding us?”
Turns out they were New York Post photographers who had shot former FTX executive Caroline Ellison, who happened to live nearby and had testified in Sam Bankman-Fried's trial. The couple came to PubKey by accident.
Trump's visit
Trump’s first foray into cryptocurrency came in 2022, when the former president launched a series of NFTs. His overall attitude toward cryptocurrencies, however, remains hesitant, but that attitude has changed as the crypto industry becomes one of the largest funders of the 2024 election cycle.
Today, Trump has enthusiastically embraced blockchain, adopting some of the industry’s recommendations, including releasing Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and firing SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.
Trump has not won over everyone, as some remain skeptical of his calling Bitcoin a "fraud" a few years ago. Meanwhile, his recent announcement of World Liberty Financial, a so-called DeFi protocol run by the Trump family, has come under fire from critics who say it is about making money rather than a genuine commitment to building a decentralized product.
During Trump’s visit to PubKey, he still hadn’t mastered some of the industry’s esoteric terminology, referring to the food for sale as “crypto burgers” rather than “Bitcoin burgers.” This is important to Bitcoin loyalists, who view other coins as “junk coins.”
Meanwhile, footage of the historic Hamburg deal initially showed the transaction failing, which Pacchia attributed to camera flashes making it difficult to scan the QR code. About 5% of PubKey’s sales come from Bitcoin, he added.
Pacchia was quick to express understanding of Trump's behavior.
Trump’s visit confirmed Pacchia’s decision to start PubKey. He gave the former president two gifts. The first is a replica of the famous "Buy Bitcoin" sign that one of PubKey's founding partners presented to then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Trump during a 2017 congressional hearing. Yellen held this sign behind her. The second is an American flag, commissioned by another PubKey patron as a prank on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to be flown over the U.S. Capitol in honor of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Still, Pacchia insisted that PubKey would not endorse a presidential candidate. He hopes Harris will come, too.
This article is reproduced in cooperation with: Shenchao
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