At first glance, PubKey looks like a typical dive bar, with karaoke and trivia. A steakhouse will open in the basement come spring. But the venue—occupying 12,000 square feet in Hill Country Barbecue’s former Penn Quarter space—is actually something more unusual: a Bitcoiner hub with a podcast studio and event space to promote the cryptocurrency, plus a think tank called the Bitcoin Policy Institute subleasing space in the back. This is PubKey’s second location, following one in New York. It’s set to open Monday, December 15.

Why a Bitcoin bar? “It’s the most approachable way for somebody to say, ‘I’ve been reading about this thing. I don’t get it, but I’m curious,” says co-founder Thomas Pacchia, a former derivatives lawyer. “They can just come in and have a pint and get in on that programming that we offer or talk to a Bitcoiner at the bar.”

It doesn’t hurt that they’re expanding to the city while a very crypto-friendly administration occupies the White House. Last fall, then-candidate Donald Trump visited the New York PubKey, where he paid for a few dozen burgers with Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attended one of the DC location’s pre-launch parties in November.

Still, co-founder Pacchia is adamant that the bar is nonpartisan, noting that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have also been invited to the Greenwich Village bar (neither has taken up the offer) and that Democratic members of Congress like Ritchie Torres and Kirsten Gillibrand have been there. “We don’t make any donations. We don’t make any endorsements. And we didn’t with Trump,” he says.

Chief operating officer Dan Kablaoui is quick to note that this is a Bitcoin bar, not a crypto bar. They don’t want to be associated with so-called “meme coins” like Dogecoin, Bonk, and $Trump. “We kind of consider them our wayward cousins,” Kablaoui says. “Most of us, as Bitcoiners, have been [into] them at some point, before realizing that you’re kind of just in a casino, and you’re wasting your time and probably losing your money.” (Bitcoin, meanwhile, has had a volatile year, hitting an all-time high in early October, then plunging nearly 35 percent over the last two months—with some rebound in the last few days.)

Pacchia adds that one of the goals of PubKey is to counterbalance a lot of the crypto lobbying dollars in DC and promote Bitcoin as distinct. “A lot of the lobby dollars that are being deployed in DC are on behalf of companies and big exchanges and folks that probably look more like JP Morgan than they do Bitcoin enthusiasts. Our hope is to be a bit of a voice for the normal Bitcoin user and enthusiast,” he says. To that end, PubKey will host weekly Bitcoin educational programs open to the public, along with “fireside chats” and other events. 

A relatively early Bitcoin adopter, Pacchia previously ran a Bitcoin investment company and began hosting Bitcoin events at one of his favorite local dive bars starting in 2016. During Covid, many members of New York’s Bitcoin community decamped from the city, and the bar where Pacchia had hosted events was closing. Pacchia saw an opportunity to bring both back. He co-founded PubKey in 2022 with his wife Megan Pacchia, a former McKinsey partner; Andrew Newman, an ex-BlackRock private equity investor; and Greg Minasian, a former film producer and entrepreneur.

“Clubs and taverns are the original decentralized disseminators of information, right?” Pacchia says. “This is where people met and discussed all sorts of things through all walks of life. So it’s meant to be very approachable, very lighthearted.”

In DC, PubKey will serve classic bar foods like smash burgers, Chicago dogs, and wings. During the day, chef Alexis Samayoa—formerly of Espita and Starr Restaurant Group—offers a “business lunch” menu that goes a little more upscale with raw bar dishes, crabcakes, pork chops with Calabrian-chili jam, and steaks with bone marrow. To drink, expect draft beers and cocktails like a bergamot old-fashioned or turmeric gin sour. One splurgier cocktail called the “Orange Phill Whale” is $100—and, unlike everything else on the menu, can only be purchased with Bitcoin. The drink itself is a Zombie tiki drink in a porcelain mug, but it comes with a bunch of swag, including a branded lighter, T-shirt, hat, and poster.

By spring, the basement will become an 85-seat dimly lit chophouse called… Dimly Lit Chophouse (or DLC—which also stands for “discrete log contract,” one of many nerdy Bitcoin Easter eggs). They’ll serve dry-aged heritage Blank Angus steaks from a farm in Virginia, along with other steakhouse staples. There will be no seed oils; everything’s fried in beef tallow.

“There’s kind of an interesting overlap between steak eating and regenerative farming and Bitcoin,” Kablaoui says, explaining how in both cases “time and effort create value.” As for whether the crypto-steak-beef tallow combo—with Trump’s New York visit in the background—might come across as MAGA-coded? “I think the coding is off there,” Kablaoui says, pointing out that, in the past, “I was called a hippie much more often than not.”

Customers can still pay with cash or card even though Bitcoin is encouraged. (Square, the payment processing system, now allows businesses to accept payment in Bitcoin with a QR code scan.) A Bitcoin “shrine” behind the bar includes a ticker tracking the real-time price of the cryptocurrency. Still, Bitcoin accounts for only 7 percent of PubKey’s overall sales in New York.

“I would say that the vast majority of guests at PubKey have no idea they’re in a Bitcoin bar,” Kablaoui says. “But they might be sitting there and then they look up and it says ‘buy Bitcoin’ and then they notice the price ticker over there and it’s sort of like this Truman Show moment.”

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