The Protocol: When Trump Bought Red-Meat Bitcoin Burgers, He Called It ‘Crypto’

Bitcoiners aren’t usually the forgiving type – especially toward perceived apostates who ape into other cryptocurrencies. That’s why Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump’s visit last week to a beloved Bitcoin bar in New York appeared so well timed – to repair any lost credibility after he and his family started promoting a decentralized-finance project that appears rooted in other blockchain ecosystems.

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Screenshot of the Zaprite invoice used by Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump to buy burgers and Diet Cokes at the bar PubKey in New York (PubKey/X)

LESSER EVILISM – It goes without saying that many Bitcoin purists do not like to mingle their business, politics or even company with users of other blockchains or cryptocurrencies. Which is partly why the Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump garnered so much scorn from Bitcoiners last week for promoting a very-much-NOT-Bitcoin decentralized-finance project, World Liberty Financial – complete with its own token, and a pre-mined allocation to insiders. “Trump launching a sh*tcoin may have been the final straw to lose my vote,” tweeted Bitcoin-friendly author Mitchell Askew. Responses on the thread ranged from total agreement to what one might call lesser evilism – the rhetorical contrast of one bad option with an even worse option: “True but it’s that or WW3 with commie Kamala,” wrote @FrictionlessBTC.

The DeFi dalliance threatened to undo much of the goodwill Trump built up at the Bitcoin Nashville conference in July, when he tossed out a series of red-meat pledges, including commuting the rest of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbrecht’s life sentence and creating a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile.” Multiple standing ovations ensued.

So it was fortuitous timing for Trump that his campaign scheduled a stop, later in the week, at the Bitcoin-friendly New York City bar, PubKey. According to the bar’s official X account, Trump bought 50 smash burgers and Diet Cokes for people in attendance, at a total cost of $998.77 including tax and tip, and then paid for it all in bitcoin. Fox News posted a video of the entire scene, leading a sharp-eyed reporter from CryptoSlate to quickly point out that Trump’s role mainly consisted of standing by at the counter while handlers actually performed the transaction, passing smartphones back and forth between them. Whatever. The bar crowd cheered. “Crypto burgers!” Trump said as he handed them out. A voice from behind the camera corrected him, “Bitcoin burgers!”

As much as it was a second chance for Trump to prove his Bitcoin bona fides, the choreographed transaction served as a sort of benchmark for the blockchain’s evolution as a viable payments option for a retail-facing business in the U.S. Will Cole, head of product at the Bitcoin payments app Zaprite (who happens to be Bitcoin-friendly U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis’s son-in-law), described what he called the “Trump stack:” PubKey, running a node on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network on Voltage Cloud, used Zaprite to provide an invoice for the purchase, and Trump paid using a Strike wallet. (Official spokespeople for the Trump campaign didn’t respond to CoinDesk’s email asking where the bitcoin originated from.)

Asked whether the episode might have helped erase any lingering disgust among Bitcoiners over the World Liberty Financial rollout, PubKey founder Thomas Pacchia didn’t exactly dispute the premise of the question: “The other stuff that the family has going on is sort of outside our purview and scope,” he said in an interview. “Everybody is on a journey toward understanding the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. I like to meet people where they are.”

ELSEWHERE:

Caroline Ellison exits a Manhattan courthouse after being sentenced to two years in prison on Sept. 24, 2024. (Victor Chen/CoinDesk)

Huddle01 CTO Susmit Lavania, left, and CEO Ayush Ranjan, on a Huddle video conference call. (Huddle01)

Huddle01, a blockchain project to provide decentralized audio and video conferencing – aiming to provide lower latency virtual meetings than Zoom and Google Meet – plans to raise as much as $37 million in a sale of network nodes.

The 49,600 “media nodes” being sold offer operators a way to contribute excess internet bandwidth the communication network, in exchange for token rewards. According to a litepaper, some 21% of the project’s HUDL tokens will be distributed to media nodes.

“These nodes will power a network that already outperforms the incumbent Web2 competitors on latency where there is a large cluster of nodes, and is capable of improving lags across the globe,” Huddle01 CEO Ayush Ranjan said in the release, shared exclusively with CoinDesk.

The project is built using technology borrowed from the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum. A test network will launch two weeks after the sale completes, according to the press release.

Huddle01 becomes the latest in a growing trend of blockchain projects conducting node sales as a way to raise funds while simultaneously decentralizing their networks.

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Fundraisings

Screengrab from Daylight blog post with examples of personalized transaction recommendations (Daylight)

Deals and grants

Deus X CEO Tim Grant (Deus X)

Data and Tokens

*Regulatory and Policy

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