Pubkey, a Manhattan Bitcoin Bar, Opens in Greenwich Village

Long, long ago in a Midtown office far, far away, I used to work for Investopedia, a website about money and investing where, among other things, I wrote about blockchain, cryptocurrency, Elon Musk, and Apple’s quarterly earnings. Now at Eater, I have a small food budget, but most of what I write about somehow still seems to relate to finance bros, food tech companies, or NFT restaurants. I guess the shoe fits.

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My hope is that this context will help explain how I ended up at Pubkey, a self-described “bitcoin bar” that opened in Greenwich Village this fall. The bar took over a basement-level space at 85 Washington Place, near Sixth Avenue, that’s been home to various dives popular with New York University students and local rabble-rousers over the last hundred years. Most recently, it was home to a pub called Formerly Crow’s, which set out to create a safe zone from the area’s “fancy-like cocktail bars and frat boy hellholes.”

In some ways, Pubkey is on a similar quest: As rich people buy wildly expensive memberships to exclusive restaurants using cryptocurrency, Pubkey’s owners want to cast bitcoin as a force to bring people together. Ironically, bitcoin is the only form of payment not accepted at the bar, but that hasn’t stopped crypto enthusiasts from turning out to show support. Earlier this month, I decided to join them.