Bitcoin Pizza Day celebrated online

Bitcoin Pizza Day returned to X on Friday, May 22, 2026, as users filled feeds with memes, screenshots and callbacks to one of crypto’s best-known origin stories. The annual observance refers to May 22, 2010, when programmer Laszlo Hanyecz completed what is widely described as the first recognized real-world Bitcoin purchase by exchanging 10,000 BTC for two pizzas. The social activity this year included posts cited in the source briefing, including one from the X account @PrinceH42580072 on May 22. (x.com) (thinkmarkets.com) The anniversary has become a recurring online ritual because the original purchase is easy to summarize and easy to visualize: two delivered pizzas, one forum post and a quantity of bitcoin that later became a shorthand for crypto’s early era. In 2026, that shorthand again appeared across X in the form of jokes about “expensive pizza,” nostalgia posts and image-based references to the 2010 transaction. (thinkmarkets.com) ### Why does May 22 keep resurfacing in crypto culture? May 22 is the date Hanyecz said the trade had gone through after first posting on the Bitcointalk forum on May 18, 2010, offering 10,000 bitcoin for two large pizzas. (x.com) Accounts of the transaction describe the pizzas as Papa John’s pizzas delivered to Hanyecz in Florida. The transaction remains useful to crypto users as a reference point because it tied Bitcoin, then a niche software project, to a tangible consumer purchase. (thinkmarkets.com) Several industry explainers still describe it as the first widely recognized commercial use of Bitcoin to buy a physical good. ### What exactly were people on X posting this year? X posts referenced the 2010 purchase with memes, celebratory images and variations on the same historical note: 10,000 BTC bought two pizzas. (gemini.com) The social briefing supplied for this story identified Bitcoin Pizza Day as an active crypto topic on X on May 22 and cited a post from @PrinceH42580072 as one example. The pattern matched how the day is usually marked online. Crypto sites and exchanges also published Pizza Day promotions and anniversary posts this week, extending the same imagery beyond X into marketing campaigns and community events. (thinkmarkets.com) ### Why does the 10,000 BTC figure still dominate the conversation? The number 10,000 BTC persists because it compresses Bitcoin’s price history into a single anecdote. Contemporary accounts say the pizzas were worth about $41 at the time of the 2010 trade. (x.com) At a bitcoin price of $111,000, that same amount would equal about $1.11 billion, based on a simple calculation. That gap is why Pizza Day posts often mix humor with hindsight, even when the original story is retold as a milestone in Bitcoin’s use as money rather than as an investing parable. (markets.businessinsider.com) Forbes reported in 2025 that Hanyecz spent far more bitcoin on follow-on pizza purchases later that year. ### Was this only an X trend, or broader crypto observance? (pizza.day) May 22 was also marked by exchange campaigns, explainer articles and dedicated Pizza Day pages published around the anniversary. Those posts repeated the same core facts and framed the date as a yearly crypto commemoration. The next visible milestone is May 22, 2027, when the anniversary will recur again across crypto platforms, exchanges and social networks that already run annual Pizza Day posts and promotions. (forbes.com) (markets.businessinsider.com)