The global market for luxury wine and spirits is forecast to almost double in size by 2032, to $470 billion. In a bid to make the marketplace more efficient, the startup BAXUS is bringing it on-chain, today announcing a seed round led by Multicoin Capital and with contributions from Solana Ventures, Narwhal Ventures, FJ Labs, and various angel investors.
The collectible alcohol market is currently splintered and illiquid, the company says, with siloed sales conducted across various websites and auction houses.
“If you’re trading with your friends in Kentucky, you’re pretty much limited to Kentucky—you don’t necessarily have the same access to a buyer in Scotland who might be really interested in your bourbon,” Tzvi Weisel, CEO and cofounder of BAXUS, told Fortune. The opacity of the market prevents collectors from accurately pricing bottles, sourcing the most coveted assets, and carrying out reliable due diligence on authenticity, Weisel added.
BAXUS hopes to fix these inefficiencies by putting the marketplace into one application to connect buyers and sellers. The company says by using open Web3 payments infrastructure it can reduce costs and increase transparency. Built on Solana, the marketplace allows buyers to transact with credit card, ACH, direct wire, or crypto including USDC. The platform launched in beta last summer and has since facilitated $8 million in transactions.
When creating a listing, sellers send bottles to BAXUS Vault for authentication and storage in a secure, temperature-controlled network of locations. The bottle is then tokenized, with each bottle issued a non-fungible token, verifying its identity, to be stored and traded on-chain. The provenance and pricing data stays attached to each NFT, which is directly stored in a collector’s dashboard from which it’s ready to be listed and traded. Any bottles purchased on BAXUS or stored in the vault can be redeemed or remain in the vault to be traded at a future date.
There’s one caveat: Collecting artisan wine and spirits is typically a hobby associated with older generations less inclined to experiment with crypto. As a result, BAXUS has abstracted away the distinctly Web3 elements. For instance, users can pay using credit cards and sign in using their email, with a user’s wallet only created on the back-end. “We made it as traditional as possible,” Weisel said.
“The fine spirits market desperately needs better pricing, liquidity, and authenticity; it’s similar to other collectible markets, like sneakers or trading cards,” Spencer Applebaum, an investment partner at Multicoin Capital, said in a statement.
“The biggest issue with all collectibles markets is real-time liquidity,” said Weisel. “When people talk about tokenizing real-word assets, they’re talking about treasury bonds and stocks, and it’s like, well, those are pretty efficient markets.” But using a blockchain for art, real estate, or other collectibles is “going to actually find new avenues for capital in a way that just taking a stock and moving it on-chain doesn’t really change anything.”
