Days after announcing the launch of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform World Liberty Financial during an interview with Decrypt sister company Rug Radio, former U.S. President Donald Trump used Bitcoin to buy burgers during a stop at PubKey Bitcoin bar in Manhattan on Wednesday.
Bitcoin backers at the bar helped Trump with the process, which included scanning a QR code with a smartphone and then apparently approving the transaction. After a moment of uncertainty over whether the transaction went through, one of the men helping Trump said, “Oh, it did go through!”
During the stop at New York’s Bitcoin-themed bar, Trump voiced his hope that the Republican Party would win in New York in the upcoming U.S. election.
“It’s a great place, I just made the first transaction in Bitcoin,” Trump said to the cheers of the crowd. “Everybody that’s a crypto guy—a crypto maniac, as I call them, because they really are—they believe,” he said, encouraging the crypto faithful to get out and vote this November.
“Get out and vote, because if you vote, we cannot lose,” Trump said. “They’ve been treating you very badly at the SEC and we’re going to treat you very fairly, because you have to get out and vote.”
On Monday, Trump warned that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins in November, crypto startups will be “living in hell” under the regulatory regime of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
“If we don’t win the election, those people that were under investigation and that are free as a bird right now,” Trump said, “and people that weren’t being looked at in the crypto world, they will be living in hell—because it will start the day after the election if they win.”
Cryptocurrency has become a political issue in Washington with Trump, a former Bitcoin skeptic, refashioning himself as a champion for crypto. Trump has launched multiple NFT collections on Ethereum scaling network Polygon, which the Republican presidential candidate credits for his change of heart on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is typically considered to be a better store of value than means of making everyday payments—and some Crypto Twitter commenters took potshots at the idea of asking Trump to pay with BTC in the real world.
When asked how the experience of using Bitcoin to buy the crowd burgers, Trump noted how easy it was.
“It’s the beginning of a new era,” Trump said. “What they’ve done is so amazing over a short period of time, and you look at the values and the kind of numbers you’re talking about, bigger than the biggest corporations in the world put together, many of them. So it’s quite something.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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