While gold surged past $5,000 for the first time in history in January, Strobe is excited to invest in a different type of gold: liquid gold. BAXUS is putting high-end spirits and wines - like this $200k bottle of Macallan - on Solana, and is on course to replatform the global alcohol market.
BAXUS is primarily a peer-to-peer marketplace for premium spirits today. However, their roadmap is dotted with exciting new product launches across verticals like borrow/lend and entirely novel consumer experiences, plus the company operates a fast-growing B2B software business called Athyna. Athyna gives distilleries and rickhouse operators a real-time monitoring dashboard that measures temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, ethanol levels and GPS location for barrels across the entire wine and spirits industry. They’ve already signed some of the world’s largest operators under active commercial agreements.
Strobe holds a thesis that blockchain technology will not only radically improve existing marketplaces, but also enable the creation of entirely new markets. These rails allow for 24/7 trading, instant settlement, improved price discovery and - most importantly - they’re grounded in automation, interoperability and the elimination of trust assumptions.
That last point is especially critical when considering illiquid, alternative investments, which are more prone to fraud – whether the item of interest is a Rothko or a bottle of Japanese whiskey. BAXUS removes the user friction of how do I know this bottle is real? and enables seamless, digital experiences where all users need worry about is the price at which they want to buy or sell. This, plus instant settlement, 24/7 trading and a native ability to borrow against assets in a collateralized manner, forms a recipe for widespread adoption of a traditionally illiquid, inaccessible and niche asset class. Just as StockX drove a 10x increase in volume for trading sneakers compared to the market before its launch, BAXUS is well on its way to doing the same for spirits and wine.
These markets are shifting away from an exclusive playground – where value is extracted by the Sotheby’s and Christie’s oligopoly through slow, expensive transactions – and toward a fast, affordable, always-on ecosystem poised for 10x growth through mass adoption. Technology, fees and superior UX alone will drive this shift, though it certainly is also being accelerated by the old guard’s own issues (see here, for example). This is a subject Strobe knows intimately well from our investment in Winston Artory Group, another business at the core of our Unbundling Sotheby’s thesis – one that is already making a very real dent in the global art market through leading collection management software and groundbreaking private credit vehicles with the world’s largest asset managers.
BAXUS also benefits from powerful macro tailwinds that the data continues to confirm. We are living through a scarcity supercycle – an era in which accelerating wealth concentration and, increasingly, AI-driven homogenization of everything digital are making culturally scarce, physically irreproducible assets more valuable, not less. As Packy McCormick argued recently: “When one thing becomes abundant and cheap, another thing becomes scarce and valuable.” When AI can generate infinite images, text and music on demand, the premium on things that are genuinely one-of-a-kind – aged whiskey, rare wine, a 1967 Cartier Crash – compounds; alcohol, such as whiskey, also has very interesting supply dynamics, whereby: a fixed amount is produced, then aged - often for at least seven years - and thereafter naturally declines due to consumption. Talk about unique supply curves and scarcity.
Further, demand is skyrocketing. The record books are being rewritten in real time. Sotheby’s just set a new all-time record for the most valuable Cartier wristwatch ever sold – a 1987 Cartier London Crash that sparked a nine-minute bidding war and sold for nearly $2m, more than double its presale estimate. Sotheby’s wine and spirits division hit $127.5 million in auction sales in 2025, up 12% year-over-year and more than double what the category generated a decade ago, with bidders from 63 countries and American bourbon entering the top three spirits brands at auction for the first time. And in February 2026, Logan Paul’s PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card sold for $16.5 million – a new Guinness World Record for the most expensive trading card ever sold at auction (purchased for $5.3m just five years prior). The pattern is unmistakable: a much higher and more concentrated numerator of capital chasing a flat or shrinking denominator of genuinely scarce assets.
The alcohol distribution industry is among the most entrenched oligopolies in the U.S. economy. Three distributors control 75% of a $70bn+ domestic market. Brands, from century-old distilleries to internet-native labels launched by celebrities, have essentially no direct relationship with their end consumers, no real-time pricing data and no meaningful ability to reach buyers outside the slow, expensive three-tier system. The result is a fragmented value chain that is opaque by design, inefficient by structure, and long overdue for disruption.
BAXUS is building what we believe will become the fourth tier in this distribution system: a digital-native, data-driven layer that enables brands to bypass the existing rails entirely. Think of it as the operating system for a $70bn+ industry that has never had one.
This is not just a secondary marketplace story. It starts with bottles, but it ends with barrels.
The BAXUS marketplace has been live for 3 years and the team has iterated with remarkable velocity. v1 enabled 24/7 real-time trading – a world’s first for spirits. v1.5 introduced the ability to place offers on any listed asset, which drove a surge in trading volume: bid/ask dynamics saw bottles on average clear 20% below previously listed prices, increasing liquidity for sellers and improving value for buyers. In financial markets, information and data are king and lead to increased efficiencies, prices and higher volumes. v1.5 saw collateralized loans go live, where BAXUS has already facilitated millions of dollars in both bottle- and barrel-backed loans. The forthcoming v2 will take the customer UX and utility a step further. Upcoming features include the creation of central limit order books for assets listed on BAXUS and the ability to leverage ‘collection offers’ across vintages and styles from a given producer. Importantly, everything BAXUS builds is onchain and crypto-native, but that infra generally lives under the hood and the platform is mobile-first and accessible to all.
The numbers speak to real, compounding traction. In 2025, BAXUS generated $50m in marketplace GMV – representing more than 3x year-over-year growth – and launched lending with a total of $5m in originations. The introduction of Offers was a particular inflection point: users have placed nearly 5k offers to date (>$1.5m notional), directly driving increased trading activity and validating that bid/ask functionality leads to greater liquidity and meaningful price discovery. User growth remained steady throughout the year, with the platform adding more than 50k net new users, and overall more than $60m in assets have been tokenized with 2.5m bottles tracked on the platform. The team also acquired BoozApp in late 2023 – the leading app for verifiable liquor pricing, with 100k engaged users – in a savvy acquihire that brought in talent and a mobile footprint in one move (spoiler alert: in the coming months BAXUS is combining its web platform with BoozApp to launch an entirely new BAXUS mobile app that will be available in the App Store with full feature set, including the team’s latest launch: the world’s first gacha-style spirits vending machine – get spinnin’ here).
The checklist of world-firsts is getting long, and this is exactly what we mean when we talk about creating entirely new markets. No one a year ago would have believed you could leverage your Yamazaki collection to borrow USD stablecoins and go bid on a range of Château Margaux bottles from the 1990s. Alas, here we are, and we are still just getting started.
While the consumer marketplace drives brand and GMV, Athyna is quietly becoming one of the most strategically valuable assets in the company’s portfolio. Deployed on the Helium network ($HNT), Athyna’s IoT sensors give rickhouse operators and distilleries real-time visibility into temperature, humidity, airflow and ethanol levels – data that has never before been systematically collected at scale. Athyna is already live in five U.S. rickhouses and recently converted its first pilot into a formal commercial partnership.
Why does this matter beyond the immediate SaaS revenue opportunity? Because rickhouse data is the key that unlocks the supply side of the market, plus it unlocks highly valuable - and previously unproductive - balance sheet assets for operators, who are currently enduring a particular time of distress with the industry navigating significant overproduction. No one else is collecting production and maturation data at the barrel level, and that data strengthens BAXUS’s right to win in primary distribution, lending and the overall institutionalization of spirits as an asset class.
Athyna is becoming the infrastructure layer to bring one of the largest (not-yet-tokenized) asset classes onchain: spirits & wine. Millions of barrels are sitting in rickhouses, quietly maturing over time, at a moment when the industry is facing significant overproduction. By giving producers better visibility into maturation, quality, risk and projected yield, Athyna can help optimize outcomes inside the rickhouse while creating the data layer needed for liquidity, financing, and (internet-native) capital formation around maturing barrels. BAXUS is not only helping distilleries monitor what they own, they are giving them the tools to treat barrels like balance sheet assets that can be priced, financed, traded and ultimately brought into a broader onchain market.
On May 4th, BAXUS went live with something the spirits world has never seen: a blockchain-powered vending machine for premium bottles. Hundreds of bottles spanning Common, Uncommon, Rare and Legendary (including the chance to pull a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle) – every pull wins with an option to immediately sell back for 85% of the value. Think gacha mechanics for alcohol – same mechanics as cards, just… liquid.
The early response has been exactly what you'd hope for. A competitive leaderboard is already live. Users are competing for daily bottle airdrops, with top spinners racking up 70+ spins in a single day. The community is forming, the vocabulary is forming with it, and the engagement loop – spin, win, share, repeat – is working.
This matters beyond the novelty. The vending machine is the first BAXUS product to put a physical interaction layer on top of the onchain infrastructure the company has spent years building. It collapses the gap between digital ownership and real-world discovery, and it is a proof of concept for a much larger surface area BAXUS is quietly building toward.
That next surface is samples: 50ml mini bottles that are themselves a genuinely new design surface – for consumers and businesses alike. We won't get ahead of the launch here, but the strategic logic is already clear and part of it is simply the price point. For the vending machine, a lower-cost entry (eg, $10-$30 per spin) promotes turnover, accessibility and repeated engagement in a way that full-bottle economics never could. This is how you build a wide, habitual audience rather than an occasional one. Importantly, we are not talking about standard off-the-shelf nips anyone can buy. This is a new design surface where brands will create new small format bottles exclusively for BAXUS, plus the company will leverage proprietary bottling technology to turn existing barrels and bottles into bespoke nips. What might that unlock?
Fractionalization at the consumer level: an expensive bottle that is out of reach for an individual becomes accessible when split into samples. A $2,000 Yamazaki 18 limited release that sits behind the counter of a bar but never gets ordered becomes something a group of 10-20 friends can share and discover together for accessible and worthwhile individual cost. This is fractionalization that makes intuitive sense to a non-crypto audience.
Taste-before-you-buy: being able to buy a sample before committing to a full bottle is a fundamentally new path-to-purchase and consumer discovery – sold commercially onchain with full provenance.
Gifting: a curated set of samples as a holiday or occasion gift is a no-brainer consumer product. BAXUS can own this occasion in the way that StockX owns the sneaker gift card.
A/B testing for brands: imagine a distillery wanting to gauge consumer response to two different mash bill expressions before committing to a full production run. BAXUS's sample infrastructure becomes a real-time, data-rich experimentation layer with direct access / connectivity to end-consumers – something no distributor has ever been able to offer.
The vending machine is live today. The samples chapter is coming (which itself will drive higher turnover vending machines). And if you want to let your imagination run: might we eventually see sleek, gold BAXUS machines tucked into the corner of a Michelin-starred bar, or a business class lounge at JFK, or the lobby of a five-star hotel in Tokyo – blending discovery, provenance and a little theatre into a single pull of a lever? We like to think so.
At the heart of every business line – marketplace, Athyna, lending, brand partnerships, samples – is data. And not just any data. BAXUS is accumulating a two-sided, proprietary dataset that combines consumer demand signals (trading patterns, wishlists, bid history, purchase behavior) with supply-side production data (barrel maturation, rickhouse conditions, inventory at the producer level) that is all captured and stored immutably onchain. No one else collects both sides of this equation. No one else even comes close.
BAXUS is also extending that data advantage beyond bottles already sitting in collectors’ home bars to something entirely novel with Hunts . The Hunts feature, launched at Breakpoint, allows consumers to capture bottles they find in the wild (at liquor stores, distilleries, bars and other retail locations), and as Hunts rolls out globally, BAXUS will gain a new layer of novel real-world market intelligence: which bottles are available where, how pricing varies by geography, what consumers are actively searching for and how sentiment differs across local markets. This is unprecedented and offers invaluable and unique data to brands around the world.
We already have a glimpse of the power of this data wedge and what it offers brands and can unlock for BAXUS on the distribution side. For example, last year Rémy Cointreau released 40 bottles of Louis XIII cognac ($30k+ each) exclusively through BAXUS for the first time ever in the U.S.; Campari Group has partnered for direct consumer engagement; and Eric Church’s JYPSI whiskey dropped on the platform. These aren’t trials or experiments. They are evidence that sophisticated, global spirits brands are recognizing BAXUS as a credible, data-rich channel to reach the consumers they have never been able to reach directly.
As the national sales director of a leading French spirits group put it in a reference call: “Producers have zero visibility into who ultimately owns their products due to multi-layer distribution. BAXUS solves this by providing complete transparency and direct consumer relationships.” He framed the opportunity plainly: [BAXUS could be] “the Uber of spirits and wine.”
BAXUS was co-founded by Tzvi Wiesel and Carrie Kellar – a founding team that combines rare domain expertise, technical firepower and an unmatched industry rolodex. They are genuine specialists, with the kind of obsessive, always-on intensity that typifies the founders we most want to back, and exactly the profile you need to break into one of the most entrenched industries in the world.
Strobe invested in BAXUS in Q2 2025 and joined the board. Through proprietary data, deep brand trust and an expanding suite of financial products, BAXUS will reshape how the global alcohol market moves – expanding the velocity of secondary trading, capturing primary distribution, institutionalizing spirits as an asset class and becoming the financial operating system for an industry that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue. Team + brand + data, compounding over time, is a formula we have high conviction in.
Like all other value in the world, alcohol will be tokenized. BAXUS will be the one tokenizing [this liquid gold], and in doing so has the potential to become a generational business that reshapes how the world's most beloved beverages are bought, sold, experienced and financed.
Interested in BAXUS? Explore the marketplace at baxus.co or try the new vending machine experience at vending.baxus.co.