# Baxus founder Todd Wiesel says Ethereum gas fees drove his alcohol marketplace to Solana Beyond Speculation, a Stabledash show. Oct 29, 2026. Todd Wiesel. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/beyond-speculation/episodes/what-turns-rare-whiskey-from-a-collectible-into-an-asset-zHpicROf4GM 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. ## 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." ## Key takeaways 1. Todd Wiesel says he picked Solana for Baxus because Ethereum gas fees of $50 to $200 a transaction made consumer commerce untenable. 2. Baxus targets the millions of people already collecting and trading alcohol, much of it in private Facebook and WhatsApp groups with no authentication. 3. 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. ## Chapters - 0:00 Hosts open the show and welcome Todd from Baxus - 1:18 Baxus chose Solana because Ethereum gas fees blocked consumer commerce - 6:47 Occasional outages matter less to consumers than high congestion fees - 9:12 Being on chain lets collectibles plug into DeFi and liquidity - 10:32 Baxus brings trust and custody to a risky gray market - 14:45 Baxus targets existing alcohol collectors, not crypto natives - 18:18 Hand onboarding non-crypto users before wallet abstraction existed - 21:15 Hosts close the interview and plan future episodes ## Transcript **Host** (0:00) Markets. **Todd Wiesel** (0:01) This is beyond speculation. **Host** (0:15) GM GM. **Host** (0:17) And we're here this time for real. **Host** (0:20) We are we are live with Todd from Baxus. Welcome. Welcome. Full full disclosure, we are good friends and **Host** (0:30) members of a prodigious DAO called Mustache DAO. You know? Definitely beards? Because I feel like I'm more on the beard side of this conversation. **Todd Wiesel** (0:41) No. Your own DAO. **Host** (0:43) It's not your own DAO. **Host** (0:45) But, yeah, thank you so much for being... Todd, it's it's, you know, episode one, a little little technical difficulties, but welcome to the pod. Would love to get your Solana origin story. And if you wanna just segue that directly into the Baxus origin story, would love to love to hit it off with that. **Todd Wiesel** (1:10) Yeah. Can you guys hear me? Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Just making sure because I got a little refresh. Yeah. So they they really are entwined, my Solano origin story and Baxis, and that I only came... I only got on to Solana because we were building Baxis. So my co founder Carrie and I, know, set out to build a trading platform and beyond for basically all things alcohol, wines and spirits. And in order to do so we, know, from the very... From the get go we knew that we were gonna build it on chain. We knew that that was where like... And again, this is 2021, so very similar to, you know, what Dakota was saying about, like, you know, you'd go over and talk to people, and they'd be like, have fun with your little project or whatever it was because they were so interested. And you saw this. I mean, just the sheer amounts of, like, VC capital that was pouring into, you know, pure NFT marketplaces that were able to, you know... Because their whole logic was, well, the advantage of an NFT is that it has no cogs. Right? Like, there's no actual underlying. You don't have to do physical storage. You don't have to do any of these things. You can mint an infinite number of NFTs to constantly create assets for volume. We had a different philosophy, a different approach, and and similar to collector crypt, and and, you know, that at the end of the day there are fads and there are trends, then there are things that are Lindy. There are things that have that type of, you know, ongoing collector base and demand. And it's not to say at all that NFTs all NFTs are dead or anything of that nature, I actually don't believe that, but the way in which we saw NFTs, the ease of launching them, you know, really eliminate... Like eliminated all of the idea of the scarcity and the stuff that makes things, you know, interesting collectibles. So when Carrie and I set out to build Baxis, our our, you know, knowing it was gonna be on chain, we were talking to people early and every single person's like, oh, well if you're doing anything with NFTs, anything like that, it has to be on ETH, it has to be on ETH, you know, liquid... All the liquidity, all the NFT transactions are on ETH. So I sat down, I started, you know, on rev some funds, started buying some NFTs, started engaging with the, you know, just general on chain community. And what I discovered very early on was you actually can't build at least at the time, and I would argue even today, you really can't build a product like Baccess or a product like Collector Crypt on Ethereum, because at the end of the day people are buying real products. They're buying cards. They're buying bottles. And so the transaction fees that, you know, effectively the gas fees, just like what Dakota was saying, like Baccess since its get go has been crypto on the back end. You can pay what... You log in with your email. You can pay with a credit card. You go through the process as if you're a total, you know, regular ecommerce shopper. You don't have to... You don't see all of the intricacies and how the tech works underneath. And so our biggest concern was, you know, we built on Solana because we want to cover gas fees. We don't want to tell users like, oh, I'm sorry. You don't have enough of this random Internet coin you've never heard of to cover the transaction. And once we look at covering the gas fees, we realize, that's not an economically viable model for... If gas fees are gonna be $50 a transaction, a $100 a transaction, $200 a transaction. Now that worked for Ethereum when people were trading just pure NFTs because they traded on Hopium. The idea is like, oh, I'm gonna pay 0.101 ETH, whatever it was with them, $220.20 bucks for a mint. I'm gonna pay $75 in gas fees just to mint it because I think that this NFT immediately upon mint is gonna be worth $500. So you don't mind paying that the three x the price of what you're buying in transaction fees. But when you look at the way that we looked at Baxxis and the way that we look at all of these on chain like RWAs and collectibles is what you're really building is the future of commerce. And 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. And that was what we found on Ethereum was the Gatsby's just made it untenable, and then raising that issue with anyone or asking them about it, there are ants like, you know, again, were early on chain guys. Everyone was like, oh, just not building it right, or oh, you just don't have a large enough audience, or you're focusing on the wrong thing. Carrie, to her credit, was like, Absolutely not. There's got to be a better way to do this. And so Carrie did a lot of research into, know, what chains were emerging or had popularity or had signs of life. And keep in mind again, this was 2021. There were a million l ones, a million l twos, all of these things. And and this is something that, you know, while the idea to put it on chain was kind of like at the get go, like I knew that that's what I wanted to do, Really credit Carrie with, know, finding Solana, leaning into it, getting into those early discord chats, and like chatting with the developers before most of the most of the protocols and projects that we all know today had even... Forget even that they had been launched, like the people haven't even, you know, touched, know, written a code or signed a transaction, really dug into the early sides of it. Realized she's like, try Solana basically. So I bought SOL, did the same thing, started trading Solana NFTs, started doing other transactions on Solana. This was again before... Yes. There were obviously memes and meme coins, but that was basically only on Ethereum. Solana at that point was really the NFT trading, and, you know, some of the other types of early protocols that that came out. But I realized after doing this, I'm like, oh, this Like, this is viable. This is an actual functional, like, chain that we can run on. Now again, it could have been that we chose, and it's not a knock on any of these chains, it could have been that we chose Polygon. It could have been we chose some other l two that had been pitching us or something else or somebody telling us, like, really you want to compound and be built on top of the Ethereum for settlement in this. But at the end of the day, again, we leaned into what is the best possible product that we can deliver to our users who don't care about the underlying technology as much. That's for us to be able to add features for us to be able to build off of, And eternally grateful that, you know, Carrie really stuck to it and said, listen, I found, you know, again, I found this chain. It's cheap. It works. It's... It it can scale. We can scale with it in a way that we'll be able to process transactions. The idea, you know, at the time all the fun was around like liveness and oh, the chain paused or that didn't... That wasn't a core concern for us. This is the the analogy I kind of always give people is, you know, Netflix runs on AWS. And I know this because whenever there's an AWS outage, if you turn on your Netflix, it'll say, hey. There's a temporary outage, you know, on AWS, like, please come back later. Netflix's service is delivering you streaming, but when there's, you know, something beyond their control, they're simply like, hey. Come back later. There's a... There's an outage. Somebody is down. To that point, like... Mhmm. No. Go ahead. Sorry. So all I was gonna say was like, imagine if instead it's not that AWS is down because let's say Netflix is always on. It's like, there's a lot of people trying to watch TV right now. Would you like to pay $750 to watch a movie? Like that's really what it is, is the congestion thing versus telling you like, hey it's down right now or there's an overload on the server, come back later. And the answer to me now again, it's different when you're talking about entertainment and Netflix than when people are talking about the necessity for banking and for all of finance, 100%. But the way that we looked at our consumer application was we don't have the same speed issues that you have if you're talking about perks and liquidations and possible on origin oracles. Our consumers are doing great volume, they're buying, they're... You know, but if we tell them like, the site is down for a couple of minutes for maintenance or again, especially at the time it hasn't been an issue lately, but at the time, you know, when you had... Even then it wasn't happening on like a daily basis, it would happen like once a year. But if you had this outage, so 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. And sure enough, that's we... CollectorCrypt, the rest of the guys who, again, were in this early, and I know it's from way way back from I think like the first break point and say... Well, like everything that Dakota was saying about the, you know, what people were saying to them versus what they believed in and stuck to is the identical to the Baccess origin story. And and I think it's a testament again to this idea that the products and the founders that are going to end up finding the product market fit, especially in something that seems like at the time was so ID... Like idealistically driven in the crypto world, has nothing to do at the end of the day with crypto. It has to do with, like, are you delivering or creating a product that people want? So that's that's one of the key things that I think most of the early crypto missed was we got great Ponzi's and great this and great that, but you never had any capital coming in to use them because they were complicated and they were... They focused too much on the technology and not enough on the on the user and what they wanted. **Host** (9:12) Could you have built this off chain? Like, I think I I I... I'm thinking about, like, the Ethereum versus Solana, but I think you... Like, using the collector clip, you know, you see, like, the arena clubs and then the correct collector clip. Like, what about the off chain versus on chain debate, and how do you think through that? **Todd Wiesel** (9:30) Sure. So, yes, we could have built it off chain, parts of what we wanted to build. But at the end of the day, where we knew where we wanna take access and where we've made progress towards and where it's going, is much better suited in a completely on chain environment. Because what we did see again was this concept and everyone was talking about is that like chains are for trading, chains are for financial products, chains are for DeFi and lending, and all of these other things that we think are... I don't even think that we knew are critical to actually converting something from a pure collector's market into an asset class, like the actual financialization elements where you have both the collectors and the enjoyers, but you also have this ability for the you know super collectors or for the people that are just interested in speculating to come on, that requires you to be able to integrate with platforms and protocols and liquidity providers in a way that you're not able to if you're running a traditional you know web two business and you're trying to run this off APIs. Like it is the on chain data and reporting that actually makes the ability to scale this as a much bigger than just the one piece of a consumer front end application, possible. **Host** (10:32) So twofold question now. What problems does Baxus solve for traditional whiskey traders, and, like, what was it like for you before this to elitate trades, globally? **Todd Wiesel** (10:49) Yeah. So it's a really good question. The first thing... And, again, this is a lot of... It... It's really... Like, this is the beauty of it is, there's a couple of nuances I would say to certain things that, like, Dakota said about collector, but at the end of the day it's the same concept. Cross border trust, making sure that what you're buying. So the alcohol world is different. We have... There's a lot more fix in the alcohol world because again PSA and and CGC and all these companies exist in the carb world. They don't exist in alcohol, so this concept of having somebody that does the authentication. Now again, that isn't to say that there aren't people faking slabs also, but again, once you have the CERT numbers and information, it's easier to look it up. There is no lookup it comes to the wines and spirits world. There is no ability to just click in and see, okay, know, this bottle has been verified. And most of the trading then, you know, took place in, you know, in private groups on Facebook or WhatsApp or these different social media channels because, and this is the second part that was really important, is you need liquor licenses in The United States. It's different in every country, but you need liquor licenses in The United States to be able to actually send people, you know, to actually sell you know peer to peer alcohol. And so all of these transactions created a ton of other sorts of secondary risk beyond the fact that again, like you're paying someone via PayPal friends and family in a Facebook group because he can't legally sell it to you. So now if that guy never ships the bottle, it's not like an eBay purchase where you can go and file and open a complaint and they'll do some sort of dispute resolution and refund you, your money's gone. And you can't file a complaint to PayPal because they're like, okay, well why did you pay for something using friends and family? That's how that's what you do when you avoid paying fees. So the idea is you send it to friends and family, it's not like, I need to do a charge back. So you're you're shit out of luck over there also. So it's kind of like if you take something that's trading as a gray market and you give it that trusted authentication, the custody, the storage, the insurance, those 360 degree scans like you did on those bottles, you're able to see again, human level expert authentication, like, which gives you that that sense of, like, security. The ability to... You know, we were talking about this earlier, like, you could stick a bunch of cards in a binder. You can have hundreds of cards, thousands of cards, and that binder will fit on a shelf. Once you start getting past a couple of bottles, it... They don't... They take up much more space than, you know, than what you're talking about with cards. And so you have, like, the space capacity also. So this was a big thing for me personally, was during COVID, I was doing a ton of trading again in these groups, like, you know, like all these like private groups before back... Before we started Baxis. And what started to happen was so many of my clients and people I sold to and worked with were like, do me a favor, like don't ship the bottles that I bought because I don't know if you guys remember, but like FedEx, UPS, all of these companies were like majorly delayed. Like stuff was getting lost. It was sitting in warehouses for months, and so they're like, listen, this is valuable. It's expensive. Just... I know you. I trust you. Hold on to it for me. We'll we'll sort this out once the shipping lanes reopen. And what ended up happening was literally my entire house became filled, like my office and then my living room, like there were just bottles everywhere. And you know my wife was like get these the hell out of here. So that was part one is like, okay, I see the part of it growing, but at the same time what ended up happening was a lot of the guys who would buy something because just like all other assets during COVID, like the prices started started skyrocketing, so people who had bought things from me, I'd be seeing inquiries or offers, you know, way above the price they paid. So I'd like message them say like, hey, that bottle you bought for a thousand bucks three months ago, well, I've got an offer on me now for 2,500. Let me let me know if you want me to sell it for you because it's sitting in my house right now. And a lot of times they'd be like, yeah, sure, like no problem. And so I ended up executing a ton of these trades, and I'm like, how do you scale... You know, I'd always wanted to create some sort of this clearinghouse, but it's like how do you scale this? How do you make it so it's no longer just me sitting here answering people's, you know, answering emails and like... Or or messages on Facebook and doing these trades for other people as like a... Like brokering it, versus like how do you make it so that two people who don't know each other, who don't need to know each other, who don't need to communicate at all, can see that there is something that one of them has and that one of them wants and actually complete a transaction without having to get everything else involved. **Host** (14:45) This is Love it. Like, you know, we... I spend so much of the time talking about, like, kind of the boring b to b side of, like, modern money and payments, but hearing this example was kinda like a light bulb moment for me of just how markets form. Like, that's such a cool origin story. And now it's like, okay. Well, what what what other thing could this apply to? Like, some people are into, I don't know, baseball bats, and, like, they collect those. And I'm not even selling, like, wood ones, youth ones, you know, from, like, the nineties and stuff like that, Really? Like, when we think, like, whiskey and and wine, like, where does this fit in? Maybe partly Solana culture and just think, like, just maybe even larger culture in general. **Todd Wiesel** (15:25) Yeah. So I will say that's one thing that I didn't early on, like, it wasn't like I went in and I started a b testing and saying, like, oh, we're gonna build this for the salon or the DJN audience. Like, had I done that, like, we probably also would have ended up doing something like watches or Pokemon cards or something that you see all of these people spending their money on, like when they have their big wins or whatever it was. We we worked backwards in the sense of, again, like, our target audience and users are the millions of people that are already out there buying and collecting and trading alcohol and doing it in an outdated inefficient, you know, and arguably, like, you know, very risky way. And so that was definitely something early on that created actually a little bit of tension was that, like, we were working on the product, we're building things, but, like, it wasn't capturing as much interest and attention from the on chain guys because even if they drink, which a lot of them do, it's not like a hobby or a passion. Now over time, we've discovered them too. As our content got better, as more people got to know us, they're out there in the same way of everywhere else. Like, guys who collect high end stuff, they they they're tons of them that we discovered, you know, eventually over time or actually are in crypto and in this space, and so they love the fact that they can buy their bottles using, you know, USCC and don't have to off ramp and use credit cards because, like, for a lot of people, like, you know, they treat their on chain money as kind of like monopoly money versus like when you see something at your credit card bill you have to really think about what you just bought. So that definitely became like a an added benefit to it as well, and actually there is one other thing I wanted to emphasize that earlier about your question of like why on chain. There is one other key piece is the finality and the instantaneity of the settlement, and that's really important when you're running a marketplace like ours, because at the end of the day, we don't own the assets that are being traded and sold. Right? They belong to the to the users, to the customers. And so the ability for a, them to prove what they own that belongs to them, like actually proving it in like a separate on chain provenance, like that they're able to, like, you know, prove that these are theirs versus just sitting in, you know, a dashboard that thinks AI now anyone can code up on a, you know, really easily spin up a dashboard that shows that you own whatever the hell do you want in the world. And the ability that when a seller sells bottle they get paid instantly because that is the one thing that again does currently work in the existing gray market world is like you expect people to pay you instantly, again even if you don't take ownership of the thing they're supposed to sell you, but what doesn't work in the old school style way of doing this like totally above board, which is the auction model, is that the auction houses will take two weeks, three weeks, sometimes up to six months to pay out their consignors. And so the idea that you can get the the speed of the cash payments and settlement in the way that you do it in a gray market with the benefit of the trust, the authentication and the security you get from a very traditional kind of web two auction market, know, was kind of like another big unlock for us. So to your point about like the crypto side, it was less about bringing something that crypto people were gonna chase to crypto and much more about this is the right way to build something that we are going to bring to millions of other people. **Host** (18:18) I know that you also handheld countless people to onboard them into Solana to use Baxus. And I remember, you know, twenty twenty two, twenty three when we first became friends and I was working for an NFT lending platform that never even made it to market. We were trying to work with you to, like, get your get your stuff listed. And I remember you were working with people that, like, were technically not savvy, but you were onboarding them and they were getting on chain and and and using the tech, which I I thought was just such a beautiful story. Right? And, like, look where we are today. **Todd Wiesel** (18:57) Yeah. So by the way, that... And that's a perfect example. Like, again, the idea of NFT backed lending and on chain lending, like, this was something that we knew from a get go we wanted to bring to... Into this ecosystem. The idea that again asked... Like, things go from collectibles to assets when, again, you get this way of actually... An asset is something that you don't just have to sell to make money off of it, whether it's either revenue generating, or it will retain value, or appreciate in value, and again you can usually borrow against it. Or somebody... Because somebody else will assign that external value versus a collectible as you may have a group of them, or a cult of them, or something that you personally like and, you know, enjoy. It's very... I think that's like one of the key distinctions between like an asset and a collectible. And that's why many collectibles can be assets, but obviously not all assets are collectible. And so that is like one of the key things over there from like us in the get go was like finding these protocols. And to your point, Maurice, like, didn't end up getting off the ground because the stuff that we were trying to build, like, I I don't wanna say more than anyone else, but I I am... I'm probably one of the largest, like to your point, like IRL hand onboarding to Solana of of almost anyone that that in this ecosystem. Because for most people, when they launch a product, they're talking to somewhat technically savvy people, the people are able to follow the instructions themselves. I I was sitting there with all of these users, like, walking them through it because at the beginning, and again, this is the whole idea, is we knew we wanted abstraction, but if you go back 2021, 2022, you didn't have email login abstraction. You didn't have... Back then, again, there wasn't even, like, the the pasties. So you were signing everything and when you've created a wallet, you have to write down your seed phrase. There were a lot of technical complications that made it difficult to onboard what we would call like the normies or the non crypto market. But we stuck to it because at the end of the day, we wanted to get them onto our platform. And that became again like a really important and critical tool for us to be able to to grow and scale from our user base. As soon as those pieces and components started coming online, that was like the big unlock for us because a lot of our... The slowdown at the beginning was again was building around the existing framework and tools that existed for the on chain ecosystem, which were designed for purely on chain, purely DJI, not really thinking about like, well, how do we on ramp or onboard the next... Forget forget even million users, like, weren't really thinking about how they onboard the next 10,000 users. And so that change became like a really big unlock for us to be able to finally go out and like start to offer our services to our target audience. **Host** (21:15) Beautiful. We're gonna need to get you back on ASAP because we were running behind today and **Host** (21:22) yeah, Zach, go ahead. This was actually made a lot... That was actually just made by our engineer during this session. But, yes on. We need to plan maybe in... At breakpoint or when beyond speculation hits 10,000 followers on eggs. Maybe we'll do, like, a big champagne by gotcha opening, Baxter's extravaganza to celebrate. But, Todd, this was... I mean, I honestly thoroughly enjoyed this this conversation. It really helped reframe just even how I think about these markets forming and why they're valuable. So thank you for coming on today. Thank you so **Todd Wiesel** (21:58) Cheers, guys. Thanks for having up. Later, brother. **Host** (22:02) Maurice, how are we feeling? We made it. I **Host** (22:07) I want more time. I want more time live. I could've kept going with Collector Crypt. I could've kept going with Baxus. I had Yep. I have my whiskey here. You know? Andre had a little k. I don't know if you saw that too. Like... You know? Well, man, I agree. I'm **Host** (22:26) going to... We will talk later this week. We're going to figure out the cadence, the time on stream, and thank you for your patience as we built in public. That's the great part about doing these things live. We get to iterate, build, refine. And if you're watching this in the comments, let us know what do you wanna see out of this. What do you want more of? We wanna make this fun. So, Maurice, thanks again. We'll see you, if not next week, the week after, but hopefully sooner. We're gonna go to a quick transition, bring Drew back, and we will continue, Live. Later.