Bitcoin does cultural diplomacy in a dive bar

Bitcoin culture, by nature, is anarchical and chaotic. It has to be, given the nature of Bitcoin itself and the people who adopted it: free-market libertarians who’ve gone all in on turning computer code into a form of money divorced from central banks, government intervention, and traceability. In short, it’s the exact opposite culture of Washington, DC, home of the federal government, where everyone agrees that the American dollar exists and is worth X amount because the government says so.

So it was a bizarre shock to K Street, the corporate lobbying heart of the nation’s capital, when it was announced that Pubkey, a Bitcoin-themed dive bar from New York City, would open its second location in downtown DC — smack dab in expense-card restaurant territory. And that’s to say nothing of the local city news sites. “Raise your hand if you plan to never set foot in there,” wrote a commenter on PoPville, a popular Washington blog that chronicles local news and had broken the news of Pubkey’s opening.

Crypto has a highly controversial reputation in town, even apart from its general cultural reputation: the Biden administration had been aggressive in trying to curb the industry’s growth, claiming that several major corporations did not have sufficient anti-money laundering protections in place. President Donald Trump’s full-bore tilt in the opposite direction — dropping the Department of Justice’s efforts to prosecute crypto crimes, pardoning several crypto executives who’d been found guilty of various financial crimes, making his own meme coin — has turned the regulation of digital tokens into a deeply partisan issue.

“Our top priority is trying to figure out how to soften that [hostility],” Thomas Pacchia, the founder of Pubkey’s New York City location, told me. To hear Pacchia put it, Pubkey DC — located strategically in the heart of DC’s lobbying neighborhood and close enough to Capitol Hill — was going to be a vessel for the Bitcoin community’s political aspirations and influence. But rather than dump money into endless lobbying against the interests of much larger crypto behemoths (and to say nothing of traditional financial institutions), Pubkey was going to do it through soft power. Instead of policy white papers and government affairs work, they were going to invite people — Republican, Democrat, important people, not-important people — into their quirky, very nice, superchill world, full of Bitcoiners who wanted to work with the government rather than evade them at all costs.

First things first: hide the wonky policy stuff behind the bar — literally.

I’d heard through the lobbyist grapevine that Pubkey would also share a lease with the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank researching the social impact of the coin. I have never seen a Washington think tank whose entrance was behind a bar. In fact, when I attended Pubkey’s VIP preview in November, I couldn’t tell that this massive bar and event space, filled with old Chesterfield sofas and layered with Armenian rugs the size of studio apartments, contained an honest-to-goodness think tank, unless you saw the glowing neon sign that said BITCOIN POLICY INSTITUTE at the very, very back of the venue.

Between me and the entrance to BPI were a hundred-plus VIP guests — elected officials, Washington power players, and staffers galore. I initially planned on taking notes of who was in attendance. I soon gave up, because there was so much other stuff to look at.

In the two hours I was at the event, I saw the following:

But the weirdest thing of all was how many people in the crowd were wearing suits.

This was exactly what Pacchia envisioned. “There are good dive bars and good hospitality in DC, for sure,” he told me later, wearing the Mario Kart bomber jacket that he’d worn in a photo with Secretary Bessent. “But the way the city operates, it’s very transient, depending on the administration: people coming and going, policymakers, staffers, the colleges and universities.” People, in other words, who could ultimately write the laws that regulate cryptocurrency like bitcoin.

The first part of that plan was to shape lawmakers’ understanding of Bitcoin, and to Pacchia, that meant bringing a curated version of Bitcoin’s oddball culture to DC: deeply nerdy protocol discussions set in a fun, affordable bar with a good burger and a secret chophouse and football and trivia and Mario Kart tournaments. But if young, broke staffers wanted to just get a post-work drink and not think about Bitcoin, other than the small sign behind the bar tracking the price of Bitcoin, that was fine too. “We wanted to cast a really wide net and just show people that the Bitcoin culture and the Bitcoin community is broadly misunderstood. We’re normal people, kind of nerdy, really into this thing. You can come here, and it’s not going to be a church.”

The advocacy part was definitely there, in the form of a giant event space behind the bar where Pubkey planned to host the evening events that make Washington run: fireside chats, summits, small conferences, and happy hours. There was even a large stage that could either be used for anything from panel discussions to live music. “DC’s more event driven,” said Pacchia, noting that the original Pubkey also hosts podcasts, panels, and get-togethers — just in a cramped Greenwich Village underground dive bar. “We wanted to combine all the different spaces that we have in New York, just with a lot more square footage to be able to host events.”

Loyal customers had been clamoring for Pubkeys in other cities, from San Francisco to Barcelona. Instead, Pubkey decided to go to a deeply partisan city where at least half of its residents loathed the concept of cryptocurrency. Sure, they had a few allies among the Democrats, such as Rep. Torres and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), but the majority of the party, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Biden, are hostile. It didn’t help that Trump had visited the New York Pubkey during his 2024 presidential campaign, paying for his smashburgers in Bitcoin, and Kamala Harris didn’t. (Pacchia says that he extended invites to both the Biden and Harris campaigns, but never heard back.) And even some Republicans remain hostile: the previous restaurant had been a popular hangout for Republican staffers and the reporters who covered them, and when it closed in April, one could hear people yelling Fuck bitcoin! from the karaoke room in the basement.

The concept of Pubkey as Bitcoin cultural diplomacy that transcended partisanship — a cryptocurrency version of Barack Obama’s beer summit — does sound overly idealistic in DC, where the current political climate has exacerbated people’s tendency to separate into Republican and Democrat bars. Liberals frequently gather to protest outside Butterworth’s, a recently opened gastropub whose investors include several high-profile MAGA influencers. A recent attempt to open a bipartisan bar, Political Pattie’s, was widely mocked by Republicans and Democrats alike — so much that it closed within 75 days.

But at its core, Pubkey DC is a pro-Bitcoin interest group that happens to be inside a bar capturing those elusive yet attainable Cozy Vibes: an affordable menu, a lot of comfy couches, and enough TVs to air as many major sporting events as possible. (They are probably going to host a Super Bowl party.) And crucially, it’s edited out all the elements of a culture that would horrify politicians — the kind that would result in, say, fraudsters pulling multibillion-dollar scams while living in a Bermuda polycule, or shady actors ordering drugs and assassinations on the Silk Road, or wealthy people being kidnapped and held hostage for their crypto. (At least downtown DC is heavily policed.)

The venue already has a few high-profile cheerleaders — including Tammy Haddad, the founder of Haddad Media, whose name is synonymous with the concept of throwing huge parties and exclusive events full of Washington’s most influential people.

When I got on the phone with Haddad, she had just come from another Pubkey event, Crypto Christmas, where three leading Senators were in attendance — Cynthia Lummis, Bill Hagerty, and Tim Scott — and dozens of young Capitol Hill staffers. “Who would think Crypto Christmas would be on 7th Street?” she told The Verge in an interview. “Some people might think it would be at the Willard Hotel or the Four Seasons, but no.”

Haddad, also the founder of the Washington AI Network, compared Pubkey’s ethos to net neutrality’s grassroots approach to winning political capital. “Back then it was more astroturfing and in states. But this is right in the downtown community, not [just with] lobbyists, but everyone else that they can bring into the party. It’s an interesting idea.
I would argue it’s a new kind of coalition building.”

As she viewed it, Bitcoin and crypto was now in the next stage of its yearslong plan to gain legitimacy: now that they had a handful of strong political allies in the states and inside Washington, they needed to play the long game by opening the discussion about Bitcoin’s future to anyone and everyone who could not score an invite to an exclusive event for policymakers at the Four Seasons. And, more importantly, they needed to show the political world that Bitcoin was not a coin solely defined by its extremely dark and checkered past.

“It’s not like Pubkey is just trying to sell drinks,” she said.