Coffee Change
Stack your bags while you spend
Created on 23rd October 2025
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Coffee Change
Stack your bags while you spend
The problem Coffee Change solves
Today, most young adults struggle to build meaningful savings or long-term investment habits. In fact, a large portion of Gen Z and Millennials have zero retirement plans — not because they don’t care about the future, but because investing feels complicated, risky, and time-consuming.
On top of that, while DeFi offers some of the best yield opportunities, the process of navigating wallets, protocols, and smart contracts is intimidating for everyday users. Coffee Change solves this by transforming micro-spending habits into automatic crypto investments — helping users build wealth effortlessly while living their daily lives.
Challenges we ran into
Building Coffee Change was an incredible technical and design journey.
One major challenge was bridging the gap between Web2 user simplicity and Web3 transparency. We needed a system that could track transactions off-chain, compute roundups securely, and interact with DeFi protocols like Aave — all without forcing users to interact with a smart contract directly.
We overcame this by designing a hybrid architecture:
Supabase for reliable transaction tracking and data syncing.
Smart contracts for automated yield generation and portfolio management for users transparently
Smart wallet connection for seamless authentication.
This balance of on-chain transparency and off-chain simplicity was key to making the experience feel effortless while staying true to Web3 principles.
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What is your product’s unique value proposition?
Coffee Change transforms every purchase into a step toward your financial future.
While other apps make investing feel like a chore, Coffee Change makes it invisible.
Our product’s uniqueness lies in:
Automatic roundups on wallet transactions: Every transaction from your connected wallet gets rounded up, and the difference is stacked toward an investment pool.
Effortless DeFi integration: Through interacting with our smart contracts users can deposit into yield-generating vaults with one click — no DeFi experience needed as our smart contract routes directly into the smart contract of other DeFi protocols.
Off-chain computation, on-chain transparency: We track and compute everything off-chain via Supabase to keep the UX smooth, while keeping wallet-level transparency intact.
Our alpha build demonstrates this flow end-to-end — from wallet connection to automatic roundup calculation and yield visualization on the dashboard — validating that passive DeFi investing can feel as simple as making a payment.
Who is your target customer?
Our ideal users are young, tech-savvy adults (18–30 years old) who want to start investing but find traditional finance and DeFi too complex. They’re the generation of digital natives who spend on coffee, food, and experiences — but rarely invest consistently.
Through community feedback and testing with university blockchain clubs and early Base community members, we confirmed this audience resonates deeply with the idea of investing while spending. They love automation, want financial control, but don’t want to “actively trade.” Coffee Change fits right into their lifestyle — passive, smart, and accessible.
Who are your closest competitors and how are you different?
Main Competitor: Acorns
Acorns pioneered the idea of round-up investing — but it’s entirely Web2, closed off from the world of crypto and decentralized yield opportunities.
How We’re Different:
🌐 Built for Web3 — not traditional banks.
⚡ Uses Base's wide DeFi ecosystem instead of centralized funds.
💸 Tracks on-chain wallet transactions, not card payments.
🪶 Designed for Gen Z — transparent, sleek, and crypto-native.
While Acorns helps users invest spare fiat, Coffee Change empowers users to grow their on-chain wealth, bridging everyday spending with decentralized finance.
What is your distribution strategy and why?
Our strategy is community-first and growth-through-credibility.
We’ll grow Coffee Change through:
Web3 Community Engagement: Partnering with Base and other ecosystem projects, university blockchain clubs to onboard early adopters.
Social Proof: Using X (Twitter) to tease UI previews, alpha launches, and community updates — driving organic excitement.
This strategy fits our product because Coffee Change isn’t just another app — it’s a movement toward effortless wealth-building. And movements grow through community, not ads.