Celebrating Bitcoin Pizza Day 2026!

Every May 22, the cryptocurrency industry celebrates the anniversary of Laszlo Hanyecz’s famous and infamous pizza-for-bitcoin trade. In 2010, the Florida-based programmer and early adopter of bitcoin offered 10,000 bitcoins if someone would buy him two pizzas. Jeremy Sturdivant took him up on the offer and had two pies — one pepperoni and one Supreme — from a local Papa John’s delivered to Hanyecz’s house for $41 dollars worth of bitcoin.

It was the first time bitcoin had been used commercially for its intended purpose as “a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” in the words of the Bitcoin Whitepaper.

It also proved to be one of the worst deals in human history.

At its current price, as of this writing, of $76,900, those two pizzas cost Hanyecz $769 million. Last Bitcoin Pizza Day, near the height of the 2025 bull market, that was worth $1.1 billion.

It was also a bad deal at the time, as someone on the BitcoinTalk forum noted, pointing out to Hanyecz that he could sell the bitcoins for $41 and buy more than two pizzas.

“I just think it would be interesting if I could say that I paid for a pizza in Bitcoins,” Hanyecz replied.

A revolution

The history-making deal kicked off a revolution, and now bitcoin is used daily in transactions via bitcoin debit cards issued by Mastercard and Visa, which let users pay at merchants using bitcoin, although the merchants receive payment in fiat.

A small but growing number of merchants also accept bitcoin directly, though many use payment processors like BitPay and Coinbase Commerce that act the same as the credit card issuers, allowing merchants to receive fiat.

Then there is the Lightning Network, a Layer 2 built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that is used by apps such as Strike and Cash App, a mobile payment and financial services platform owned by Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey’s Block, Inc.

Bitcoin is also used in the remittance market alongside stablecoins, allowing workers to send money home to poorer countries without the wait time and expenses of traditional remittance services, which can charge $12 to $14 for a $200 payment.