popsto🌲

fuck the markets we just keep going

an incredible day 1 for @rektdrinks energy we even had the amazon team reach out due to an exceptional first day of sales very excited for what this year is gonna bring for us

it's not even the end of january and so far in 2026 we have: - launched @rektdrinks across ~200 @GiantEagle stores with in-store $REKT rewards on @base, almost 10x our sales target already + driven thousands of interactions with @baseapp - announced a strategic partnership with @opensea - launched and sold out a collaboration drink with @WORLDSTAR - partnered with @XGames Aspen, launched and sold out a collaboration drink in just 1 minute - one more thing to come markets will be markets but it's not gonna stop us from working as hard as we can. it's gonna be a big year, still lots more to come.

$REKT: proof of concept to proof of scale to put it bluntly, last year was pretty brutal for memecoins and altcoins with lots of things down over 90%. despite that $REKT ended the year 30% higher, making it the 34th best performing coin in the top 500. we weren't immune to the market, despite the above stat, $REKT is currently 82% down from its highs, but also notably up 400% from its starting price in november last year. this is a pretty long post, so the quick tldr to summarise is: 2025: we sold over a million drinks without any traditional marketing or distribution, partnered with large brands in and outside of crypto, launched in 200 stores across 4 different states and signed with a distributor with a network of 13,000 retailers 2026: have the rails in place for customers to claim $REKT from drinks purchases in store, the first promotion will start mid-jan, if successful, have the potential to expand this strategy on a much larger scale with key partners involved → this is what takes @RektDrinks from just a small crypto drinks company to being able to compete with the largest players, given we’re the only ones doing this on this scale. full post: in 2025, i had the following goals in my head: 1. articulate the “brand coin” narrative in a way that it could be understood and accepted more broadly 2. make $REKT the pioneer + proof of concept of this narrative 3. sell a fk tonne of drinks 4. get people outside of our immediate community to understand i) how strong our brand and community is ii) how hard i am going to work on making this successful all things considered, i think we did a strong job at attacking these goals - the proof is in our achievements such as the relative performance mentioned above and selling over a million drinks in our first year. here’s a quick recap of what we did in 2025: - sold over a million drinks direct to consumer from our website (rekt.com), without any spend on traditional distribution or marketing - collaborated with some of the biggest crypto names to produce co-branded drinks including @base, @opensea, @binanceus, @moonpay, @abstractchain, @jupiterexchange - partnered with @gsqholdings which saw $REKT get acquired by a NASDAQ listed company - sponsored @fazeesports who reached the finals of the recent major, and announced an upcoming collaboration product with - activated in @7eleven stores in LA - commenced our first full retail launch across almost 200 @gianteagle stores in 4 different states - signed with @superior_bevgrp, a leading distributor with a portfolio of 13,000 retailers across the midwest - announced the launch of Rekt energy products - partnered with @manorsgolf to launch collaboration merch and host the largest golf tournament in crypto, with over 21k live viewers on stream - teased upcoming collaborations with @xgames, @worldstar and @ledger - acquired rekt.com - announced partnerships with @AspenDigitalAMP and @EVGHQ to bring $REKT to an institutional audience - announced a $REKT purchase policy where 10% of revenues will go towards buying $REKT in the open market we’ve had our fair share of challenges, including a difficult market backdrop and a big liquidity cascade in $REKT, but with each setback we’ve been transparent, vocal and kept our heads up working as hard as possible (ballz on forehead) i’m happy with our output and it’s only been possible due to the hard work of the entire rekt team, our partners and most importantly the support of our community. however, now is not the time to chill and pat ourselves on the back. despite a challenging market, i still believe we have an incredible window of opportunity to scale REKT into something far bigger than it currently is; we have proved our concept and very clearly have the momentum behind us, to the point where we have had some incredibly interesting conversations and meetings in the non-crypto world and i believe there is a huge amount of interest in what we are doing. the rekt story had gone from: “this is stupid they can’t compete in the drinks market” → “this will never work who cares about owning $REKT” → “oh it’s nice the sold some drinks but can they keep doing it?” → “ok fuck they’ve kept selling drinks and it’s grown” → “can they scale it?” and it’s this last point of scaling that i think is the most important. selling drinks from our website is great but ultimately to make something special we have to demonstrate that what we’re doing is scalable. if we tried this whole “drink to earn” concept 2 years ago it would have barely gotten off the ground; but a LOT has changed since then including a more inviting regulatory backdrop in the US, as well as a far better user experience for claiming, custodying and trading tokens, which didn’t exist until recently. as a reminder, the $REKT token foundation currently owns roughly 33% of the supply, which at today’s market cap of $99m is worth $33m - these are tokens that the foundation has at its disposal to reward those who buy drinks, products, community etc etc. the way i explain it to the trad drinks industry is that it’s a marketing budget, or a “user acquisition budget”. even though $REKT is down 82% from the highs, $33m is still a huge budget (and indeed the value of this budget was $200m at one point). now, the goal here is two-fold: 1. can we create a simple process where normies can go into a store, physically buy @rektdrinks, and then claim their coins with minimal friction? 2. can we do this in a way where we can demonstrate that it is “scalable” without creating too much supply/sell pressure on the market? for the first point - i think we’ve figured this out. there are a handful of options, but we’ll be trailing the first one across almost 200 @gianteagle stores in the middle of this month, where customers will be able to buy drinks in store, receive a coupon that’s printed with their receipt, and scan and claim coins on their phone seamlessly. drinks have been rolling out across stores over the last month without any promotions or marketing, and the feedback we’ve had is that sales have been “better than expected”, so next month we’re going to see the true test and impact of launching a $REKT promotion in store. if this “works”, how can we scale it? well, we’ve made our first steps towards working with distributors with a huge portfolio of tier 1 brands and retailers (13,000 retailers actually as i mentioned earlier). the way i see it, if the GE promotion goes well, we have an incredibly unique story to tell to everyone else out there, and the required channels and rails already in place to scale and expand. this also dovetails nicely with our partnership with @fazeesports (a fan base of almost 300m) and our upcoming energy products, which will be another natural targeted distribution channel for what we have coming up. the key here is to be thoughtful and sensible about emissions; ultimately, it is paramount that the growth of the value of $REKT as a result of our success far exceeds the price impact of distributing tokens consumers over time, and this is something we are also laser focused on - it’s more of an art than a science. to extend on that last point, in order to make it work, we also need to improve the liquidity and structure of $REKT as a token. Ethereum mainnet is not the easiest place to have your primary liquidity on, but i still believe that was the right decision for us as we’ve attracted more people with a “hodler mentality”. nonetheless, we will be working closely with the token foundation and their wide resources to improve the liquidity and access to $REKT over the next few weeks and months. i’ve spoken above about our plans for scaling and ultimately selling more drinks across a wider range of channels that we’ve not yet accessed to date, but another main goal of mine is to get a larger proportion of the “crypto investing crowd” into $REKT. as i’ve mentioned a few times, i don’t view other coins or crypto projects as our competitors; i view traditional CPG brands as our competitors. my goal here is to demonstrate a use case of crypto in an industry that has been around for centuries, and show how it can be used to create a real brand and a real business with real revenues. consequently, i want $REKT to feel like it’s something the entire crypto community to get behind…like…a win for @RektDrinks is a win for crypto, because i think if we can make this successful on a large scale, it’s going to bring a lot more eyes and interest to our world. we have specific plans to achieve this, which also combine with our goals to scale, and there’ll be more on that as the year progresses. to summarise, i think we’ve graduated from the FAFO/experimental stage to a clear pathway for growth and success - to me it’s very obvious what we need to do, and how to measure if we are successful, and where the pieces fall in place for us to scale this if we truly are. as i’ve mentioned a few times, Rekt was my sole and only focus last year, and it will continue to be so because i don’t think i will ever have a better opportunity in my life to create something on this scale. gonna be fun to look back on this post in a year’s time. $REKT (i've linked some useful posts below if you're a first-time $REKT researchooor)