Trails Coffee: Rewards Customers Actually Own

JP Gaviria and his wife were looking for a way to pursue their passions and make a decent living at it. It just so happens that JP's passion is bitcoin, and he had been active in nearby Vancouver's bitcoin community for years. So they opened a coffee shop that gives her the flexible schedule she needs and gives him a way to share his passion for the pinnacle of monetary evolution.

Trails Coffee sits at a trailhead near Buntzen Lake, forty minutes from downtown Vancouver. It roasts its Buntzen Blend on site and holds a 4.8-star rating across 100+ Google reviews. The Trails Coffee app lets customers order ahead, earn rewards and pay with bitcoin for 10% off. JP's goal was simple: get people using bitcoin first, and let the questions come after.

Most loyalty points are built to lose value. Airline, hotel and credit-card points depreciate on purpose. JP wanted to reward customers with something whose value grows: bitcoin. And he wanted them to hold it in wallets they own and control themselves.

Every route he tried broke something. His own Lightning node worked for personal spending, but adjusting channels, liquidity, and routing for every customer was never going to scale. eCash came next. He built a branded rewards wallet on Cashu, but it was too much headache for JP and his customers. JP couldn't get BTCPay Server's eCash plugin to send payments, his customers still carried the risk of trusting a mint, and asking newcomers to store a recovery phrase and pick a mint was too much friction. The fallback was to issue customers with custodial wallets hosted on his own BTCPay Server, but holding customers' money was the last thing a bitcoiner like JP wanted, especially for people who wouldn't know any better.

Trails Coffee integrated the Breez SDK directly into its own app. It ticked all the boxes. The SDK is simple enough for a non-dev to build on, it lets customers maintain control over their own money, it scales automatically as the business grows, and it delivers all the functionality JP and his customers need without the friction.

JP is a bitcoin enthusiast and coffee aficionado, not a software developer. After hearing how Primal weighed the tradeoffs and chose the Breez SDK, he pointed his AI coding agent at it and shipped. Where his own node had meant channels and liquidity, and eCash had meant trusting a mint, the Breez SDK took the backend management and customers' funds off his hands. The app gives every customer a Lightning address at trailscoffee.com, and that's all it takes to send them a reward.

Every customer who downloads the app leaves with bitcoin in a wallet they control, often their first. The discount brings them in, the rewards bring them back. What a perfect way to start a conversation…over a hot cup of coffee.