Nation-state adoption of Bitcoin has become the new frontier for cryptocurrency advocates, a far cry from the days when the currency’s biggest accomplishment was buying two slices of pizza.
Sixteen years after that first recorded transaction, the Bitcoin community has made a distinction holiday on May 22 with new evidence of how much the currency has moved.
Bitcoin Pizza Day: A Transaction That Changed Everything
Back in May 2010, software developer Laszlo Hanyecz posted an offer online: 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizza Delivered to his door.
the Bitcoin What he spent was worth about $41 at the time. At current market prices, the same amount of Bitcoin is worth more than $767 million — and when Bitcoin reached an all-time high of about $126,000 in October 2025, the value of those 10,000 coins briefly exceeded $1.2 billion.
Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Sixteen years ago, 10,000 Bitcoins bought two pizzas. Today these coins are worth around $760 million and we are still debating how to tax the transaction.
Adoption and use cases have grown and cryptocurrencies are now a $3 trillion industry. We need clear rules, reasonable taxes and a reasonable market. pic.twitter.com/t5iI9Bte8h
— Crypto Innovation Council (@crypto_council) May 22, 2026
the practical It was little more than a quirky footnote. Nischal Shetty, founder of cryptocurrency exchange WazirX, said the exchange has proven that decentralized digital assets can facilitate real trade.
Only a few hundred transactions were processed on the Bitcoin network daily at the time, with almost no payment infrastructure or institutional involvement.
From two pizzas to oil tankers
The amount of ambition surrounding Bitcoin has grown dramatically since then. In April 2026, Iran announced that the ships were crossing the border Strait of Hormuz – one of the world’s most important shipping waterways – can pay tolls in Bitcoin, US dollar stablecoins, or Chinese yuan.
This announcement generated a lot of interest in cryptocurrency circles. However, according to Sam Lehman, head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, there is no on-chain evidence that any oil tax was paid in Bitcoin as of the publication date. Tether’s USDT stablecoin has remained the dominant payment method for these transactions.
Image: Investopedia
Long road to real-world use
In the United States, lawmakers have been pushing Bitcoin-related legislation as well. A renewed effort to create a strategic bitcoin reserve was introduced through the ARMA bill, with some states also moving to exempt bitcoin payments from certain taxes.
Hanyecz’s 2010 buy remains A symbolic starting point For all that. His desire to treat bitcoin as actual money — at a time when almost no one did — helped lay the foundation for everything that followed.
What started as a $41 experiment has now become a global conversation about national reserves, international trade, and the future of money itself.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
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