Building Mesa: Free Shop Tools and a Treasury Your Neighborhood Governs

A few years ago, we started asking a question that felt simple but kept getting more complicated the longer we sat with it: what would it look like if a neighborhood could build its own economic infrastructure?

Not a nonprofit. Not a grant program. Actual infrastructure — a way to pay, a local marketplace, a treasury the community governs — built with and for the people who live there.

Our first answer was Chi Coin. Our current answer is Mesa.

What Is Mesa?

Mesa is a free point-of-sale, booking, and analytics app for neighborhood shops. A barber rings up a cut, a cafe takes an order, a mechanic sends an estimate — all in one app, for free. The shop keeps 100% of its price and every tip, paid straight to its own account.

The customer pays a small community fee on top, 4% + 30¢. After card processing, that fee is split automatically: 60% goes into a community treasury, and 40% keeps the platform running. Every transfer is recorded, so anyone can see what the treasury holds. And the neighborhood — not a company and not an investor — votes on how it gets used.

Mesa means table. The idea is in the name: pull up a chair, everyone eats.

Why Redlining Still Matters

Between 1935 and 1940, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods across 239 American cities, and the Black and immigrant neighborhoods were graded "D" and colored red. Those areas were denied mortgages, insurance, and investment for decades. Chicago was one of the most heavily redlined cities in the country.

The effect compounds. Today, money in those neighborhoods mostly flows out — to card processors, booking platforms, and chains — and very little circulates back. A shop owner on the East Side pays fees on every sale and never sees that money again.

Mesa doesn't claim to undo ninety years of damage. It changes one thing that can be changed right now: where the fees go.

Why We Moved On From Chi Coin

Chi Coin was a community currency on Base L2, with a parallel USD + CHI pricing model, a DAO, and an automated market maker. We built all of it, and Eastside Coin piloted the model on the South and East Sides.

It taught us a lot, and the most important lesson was this: what neighborhoods need is the treasury, the governance, and the local circulation. They don't need a token whose value depends on raising outside liquidity first. Asking a barber to understand a liquidity pool was asking the wrong person to solve the wrong problem.

So we rebuilt around real dollars. One dollar is one dollar. Shops get paid like any other card sale. The community still governs a treasury that grows with every transaction on the block. Everything that mattered about Chi Coin survived; the parts that got in the way didn't.

What We Built at EngineerChi

- A full point of sale on Stripe Connect: card, QR, and phone orders, tipping, no-show deposits, bank transfers for big jobs, and Tap to Pay on iPhone.
- Bookings, staff and barber accounts, order queues, mechanic estimates, and an analytics dashboard.
- A fee-routing system that moves each slice of every payment into dedicated, ringfenced accounts.
- Community tools: proposals and voting, a neighborhood feed, a local leaderboard, and civic data like potholes, traffic, air quality, and the historic redlining map.
- Fully bilingual in English and Spanish.

The stack is React Native and Expo on the phone, Django and PostgreSQL on the server, Stripe Connect for payments, and Redis and WebSockets for real-time chat and order updates.

Where We Are Now

Mesa is a real company now — Mesa Treasury LLC — and the app is submitted to the App Store. We have 15 to 20 Chicago shops lined up for launch on the East Side, starting with the barbershops.

The long game hasn't changed. Once the model is proven here, we want to package it so other cities can build their own: every American city has a redlining map, and every one of them has neighborhoods that could use this.

If you run a shop, work in community economic development, or just want to see what it looks like when a technical team tries to build something that matters, visit mesatreasury.com — we would love to talk.

— Chuy Medina, EngineerChi