Coljac Café in Farmington, Missouri, now runs on Bitcoin rails for a meaningful slice of its business — about 5% of annual sales, and as much as half of morning volume when weekend Bitcoin meetups roll through. The café first accepted Bitcoin and Lightning through Coinos.io before switching to Square, which the company says has crossed 1 million vendors accepting Bitcoin. Through 2027, Coljac charges no fees on those transactions; after that, it plans a 1% fee, still under what credit card processors take.
A café that became a meeting point
Farmington isn't a crypto capital on paper. But the café has turned into something like a clearinghouse for a regional Bitcoin circular economy stretching south of St. Louis. The weekend meetups are the spike: customers show up, order, and pay in sats instead of swiping a card. That's where the 50% morning-sales figure comes from — a number that would look absurd almost anywhere else.
Behind it sits a fairly ordinary menu and a fairly ordinary town. The Bitcoin part runs quietly in the background.
Who else is taking it
The café isn't alone. More than 40 merchants within a two-hour radius accept Bitcoin, according to the btcmap.org directory. The list reads less like a tech conference and more like a rural Missouri supply chain.
Milkmen Farms Alliance runs weekly delivery routes for raw milk, eggs, and meat to St. Louis doorsteps, and it takes Bitcoin. Cherrywood Golf Course in Fredericktown accepts it for green fees, drinks, and lodging. So does The Station at Sawyer's Landing, also in Fredericktown, for overnight rooms. In Farmington, Hairapeutic — a salon — takes Bitcoin. Sneak a Peek Ultrasounds accepts it for pregnancy imaging. Bobs Tractor & Equipment Repair accepts it for heavy diesel machinery work.
That last one stands out. Heavy equipment repair isn't the kind of purchase anyone makes casually, and it isn't the kind of merchant that sets up crypto payments for novelty. Somebody decided the demand was real.
Square's million-vendor milestone
The café's switch to Square lines up with a broader shift. Square says it has officially crossed 1 million vendors accepting Bitcoin. That's a distribution story more than an ideology story — merchants don't have to build their own payment stack, they just toggle a setting on hardware they already use.
Coljac's fee schedule makes the math plain. Zero fees until 2027 is a promotional runway. After that, 1% is still cheaper than the card networks. For a small café, that spread is the whole argument.
What the 2027 fee change means
The 1% fee arriving in 2027 is the first real test. Right now, the café absorbs no cost for accepting Bitcoin, which makes it an easy default. Once that changes, the question is whether customers keep paying in sats or drift back to cards out of habit.
The meetups will probably keep the weekend numbers up regardless. The weekday numbers are the ones to watch.
What's less clear is whether the model travels. Coljac works because a handful of regulars made it work, and because a directory like btcmap.org gave 40-odd nearby merchants a way to find each other. That's a network effect built by hand, one Farmington storefront at a time. Whether it holds past the fee change is an open question — and 2027 isn't far off.
