Victoria, Seychelles — On the eve of the 16th annual Bitcoin Pizza Day, global digital asset exchange ZOOMEX is launching Pizza Week — a campaign that uses the anniversary of the first real-world Bitcoin transaction to make a pointed argument about where the crypto industry should be headed.
The story behind the date is well known. On May 22, 2010, Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz posted on the BitcoinTalk forum offering 10,000 Bitcoin for two large pizzas. A British forum user accepted. At the time, those 10,000 BTC were worth roughly $41. At Bitcoin’s all-time high in May 2025, they would have been worth more than $1.1 billion.
ZOOMEX is not interested in relitigating that math.
“The industry has spent sixteen years obsessing over what that pizza would be worth today, and in doing so, completely missed the more interesting question,” said Fernando Lillo, ZOOMEX Chief Marketing Officer. “Laszlo wasn’t making a trade. He was running a test. And the result of that test wasn’t a loss — it was proof that the whole idea could work. A technology that can’t interact with daily life is still a technology, not a currency. That distinction is what Pizza Week is about.”
The institutional case for Bitcoin has since been answered many times over. MicroStrategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder, now holds 818,869 BTC — nearly 4% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist — acquired at a total cost of more than $68 billion. The U.S. government maintains a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Sovereign wealth funds have disclosed exposure. Global crypto market capitalization sits between $2.5 and $2.7 trillion, with Bitcoin accounting for roughly 60%.
But ZOOMEX argues the industry has drifted from Laszlo’s original intent. The dominant message for years has been to hold and accumulate — never repeat the “mistake” of spending Bitcoin. That narrative, the company contends, is beginning to break down. Monthly transaction volumes on crypto payment cards surged from approximately $100 million in early 2023 to more than $1.5 billion by late 2025, with an additional 211% year-over-year increase recorded in March 2026. A quarter of American adults now use crypto for everyday transactions, payments, and financial management.
