Beyond Speculation · · 23 min

What Turns Rare Whiskey From a Collectible Into an Asset Class

With Todd Wiesel, CEO of BAXUS

Key takeaways

  • Todd Wiesel says he picked Solana for Baxus because Ethereum gas fees of $50 to $200 a transaction made consumer commerce untenable.

  • Baxus targets the millions of people already collecting and trading alcohol, much of it in private Facebook and WhatsApp groups with no authentication.

  • Todd Wiesel says on-chain data lets Baxus plug into protocols and liquidity providers and settle payments to sellers at once, which slow-paying auction houses cannot match.

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0:00Hosts open the show and welcome Todd from Baxus1 of 8

Summary

Wiesel argues that low fees, on-chain settlement and a regular checkout made Solana the right base for trading wine and spirits, a market that had been running in private chat groups.

Todd Wiesel and his co-founder Carrie set out in 2021 to build Baxus, a trading platform for wine and spirits, and knew from the start it would run on chain. In a Stabledash Live interview, Wiesel said Ethereum gas fees of $50, $100 or $200 a transaction ruled that chain out, and the company built on Solana instead.

Why Solana

Todd Wiesel said adding fees to commerce defeats the purpose: "if your solution for the future of commerce is taking something that you're claiming has friction and adding more friction, then you're not building the future of anything." He credited Carrie's research into emerging chains in 2021 with finding Solana and getting the team into its early Discord chats.

On reliability, he compared the chain to Netflix running on AWS, arguing that a brief outage is easier on consumers than high fees. He said critics who call Solana not a real chain miss that it is, in his words, the only chain for real consumer applications, and that product market fit comes from building something people want.

“All of the pure cypherpunk crypto people are like, oh, this isn't a real chain. Oh, this is this this is that. And the rest of us are sitting here being like, we can... This is the only chain you can build real consumer applications on top of.”
Todd Wiesel

A gray market problem

Todd Wiesel said alcohol trading moved into private Facebook and WhatsApp groups because peer-to-peer sales in the United States require liquor licenses, and that the market has no authenticators like PSA or CGC in trading cards. During COVID, clients asked him to hold bottles instead of shipping them, and prices rose so fast that a bottle bought for a thousand dollars drew offers of 2,500. That brokering showed him the need for a clearinghouse.

Collectors first, crypto second

Baxus worked backward from existing collectors, which Wiesel said caused early tension because on-chain users paid it less attention. Some crypto users later liked paying in USDC without off-ramping. Behind the scenes it is crypto, but users log in with email and pay by credit card. In 2021 and 2022, before email login abstraction, Wiesel says he walked many non-technical users onto Solana by hand.

From collectible to asset

Todd Wiesel said auction houses take two weeks, three weeks, sometimes up to six months to pay consignors, while Baxus pairs fast settlement with authentication. He separates assets, which can earn revenue, hold value or be borrowed against, from collectibles, and said being on chain lets Baxus connect with liquidity providers to financialize bottles.

Wiesel's case for Baxus is about the product, not the ideology: he says low fees, instant settlement and a familiar checkout are what bring existing collectors on chain, and that this goes, in his words, "beyond speculation."

Baxus, Netflix, Netflix Inc., and AWS come up most.

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