The project, PizzaDAO’s Rare Pizzas, is providing this pie bounty by selling thousands of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the metaverse. Thousands of pizza NFTs from over 300 artists have sold for roughly $1.5 million since March 2021. 

Sam Weinrott, aka Snackman, a member of the Rare Pizzas team, said the project has a shop in Cryptovoxels selling “virtual pizzas” to raise money and support local pizzerias around the world that have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We believe that there’s not a pizza scarcity problem, there’s a pizza distribution problem,” Weinrott said. “Anyone who just wants to celebrate pizza and cryptocurrency can join us. We’re inviting the world to join us at our pizza party.”

PizzaDAO says it has onboarded roughly 380 pizza shops in six continents since first being conceived on Clubhouse in February 2021.

Weinrott described the effort as a “global bake sale,” with 51% of the proceeds going to pizzerias all over the world and the remaining 49% going toward paying the team.

Bitcoin Pizza Day commemorates the first commercial transaction using bitcoin as currency. On May 22, 2010, when bitcoin was a little over a year old. programmer Laszlo Hanyecz used bitcoin to buy two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 BTC. At today’s price, that bitcoin is worth about $352.4 million.

Bitcoin booster Anthony Pompliano is staging his own Bitcoin Pizza promotion, a popup partnership with 10 independent pizzerias that will raise money for charity but notably not accept bitcoin for payment. Rare Pizzas – with its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and embrace of digital assets – may be the more crypto-native celebration of the yearly phenomenon.

Rare Pizzas has enlisted the help of the Slice app to deliver the free fare.

“To redeem a free pizza from your favorite local pizzeria, download the Slice app and use code FREEPIZZADAY on May 22nd,” Slice said in a press release.