SOUND HSA: Sats for Every Step

SOUND HSA was founded by Stu Lackey and Jon Gordon, two healthcare veterans who could no longer bear to watch Americans save for medical bills in accounts that barely grow. Although Americans have saved $174 billion in health savings accounts, only about one account in ten is invested, and cash in an HSA often earns 0.10% or less.

Based in Nashville, SOUND HSA offers a health savings account with bitcoin held in multisig cold storage by a qualified custodian. And their free Move to Earn app lets people earn sats for completing step challenges. To pay those rewards, they needed a way to send tiny amounts of bitcoin to thousands of people, many of whom had never held bitcoin before.

Rewarding steps means paying out very small amounts often. A reward for one challenge might be worth a few cents. Card networks and bank transfers can't move amounts that small without the fees eclipsing the reward, and a points system that pays out later, in gift cards for example, breaks the emotional link between the walk and the reward.

SOUND wanted the rewards to be real bitcoin in a wallet users control themselves, arriving as soon as a challenge is done. Running Lightning infrastructure to accomplish that would have pulled a small team away from the health product. And holding users' reward balances for them would have made SOUND a custodian of yet another pot of money.

SOUND HSA integrated the Breez SDK directly into its Move to Earn app. It works as a payments engine between the step counter and the user's wallet, invisible to everyone except the engineering team.

The Breez SDK runs the whole wallet in the Move to Earn app: payouts, Lightning addresses, sending, and receiving. Payouts can be as small as the reward needs to be, which made micro-rewards possible from day one. There is no node to run, no channels to open, and no liquidity to manage, so a five-person team kept its engineering time on challenges, which is what the HSA and the product people actually see.

5,000+ people have signed in to SOUND HSA, more than 1,100 have completed at least one Move to Earn challenge, and over 15 million sats have been distributed globally. The app is the front door: people come for the step challenges, get their first bitcoin, and learn what a bitcoin health savings account can do.

Every step earns bitcoin now. The savings account is the next step.