#370: REKT and Brand Coins

😨 PLUS: Polymarket's awareness and gamification strategy

Before we get into it, I want to share this hilarious picture of my cat Nara I took last week. Despite the look of terror she has, I promise she’s a happy cat! She just isn’t the biggest fan of being carried…😅

Alright, on to the serious stuff.

REKT and brand coins

Over the past years, we’ve seen the memecoins proliferate to a point where there are subcategories of them. From my piece on memecoins last year, we’ve seen these terms pop up along with others that I didn’t mention below (celebcoins, startupcoins à la Believe, etc.)

And now we have a new genre of memecoin, “brand coins” with REKT claiming the title of the first. For REKT’s third anniversary, the founder OSF shared a post detailing the history, thesis, and vision for REKT as a brand coin.

TLDR of Rekt brand history:

• OSF was a former trader (and still trades) who started creating digital art during the height of the NFT cycle

• May 2022: The REKT brand started as a free mint NFT collection with no proceeds or roadmap

• Summer 2023: As the Rektguy community grew, OSF and team explored products for the emerging Rekt brand and landed on drinks. Mass marketable and on brand (all Rektguys are drinking from a bottle like the above).

• Early 2024: The team manufactured the first batch of 10k drinks, brought them to IRL events, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback

• April 2024: Rekt Brands (parent company) gave 10% of the company equity to NFT holders, further aligning the company and community. Details here

• October 2024: Manufactured 250k drinks and sold out in <48 hours

• November 2024: Raised $1.5M

• November 2024: Launched the REKT token to the ecosystem

• May 2025: Launched a new flavor in partnership with the Abstract blockchain, and sold 223k drinks in 40 minutes

The history and milestones OSF shared are important because he’s making the case that rekt isn’t just a NFT collection, product, or token. It’s all these things and more: it’s a brand with traction.

So where does the concept of a brand coin come in? I don’t want to butcher OSF’s take, so here it is in its entirety and is worth reading, at minimum as a thought exercise:

While REKT is a memecoin, if you have spent a lot of time in memecoins you will know that the term is actually rather broad. There are internet memes such as PEPE, there are celebrity coins such as TRUMP, there are culture coins such as MOG, etc etc. These all fall into the category of a memecoin, and the common denominator for the most successful coins is that they are relatable and something a large group of people identify with. I feel BOTH of these points describe the feelings of our community to the concept of REKT.

However, REKT is not a concept that fits into any of the former sub-categories. Rekt Brands is a brand that encompasses a range of ideologies including aggressive risk taking, degeneracy and the ability to survive even when you’re down bad. Rekt Drinks are the tangible engine to the brand, but like Red Bull or Monster Energy, REKT is more than just a drinks company, it’s a way of life.

Now, let’s say you’re a fan of an upcoming brand (in any industry), you probably buy a lot of their products and express some loyalty to them, and are rooting for them to make it big. One day you will boast about how you “found them first”. However, beyond bragging rights, you have nothing to really show for your vision.

Now, imagine that this brand had an official coin. The coin does not own any of the IP or technically benefit from any of the company’s revenues unless the company decided to buyback the coin like Rekt Brands has, however, it is an asset that appreciates in price due to speculation, attention and an improving sentiment for the company it references. It is not a security or a financial instrument, it has no inherent value, yet its price moves up as the company expands and gains success.

Now as the brand succeeds, you can show off how early you were, how much you supported and believed in the vision. Additionally, as the brand succeeds and the brand coins price increases, not only did the brand and its shareholders win, you won too. The brand also has a mechanism to easily track who believed and followed them, who supported at every opportunity.

This is, what I am officially classifying as a “brand coin”. A brand coin is a token for supporters of a brand; it’s for fans who may not have the opportunity or capital to invest in a private seed round, but should be rewarded for their loyalty and playing an instrumental part in a brand’s success.

And this is exactly what REKT is.

Does REKT own the Rekt IP? No. Does REKT earn revenues from Rekt Drinks sales? Not strictly. Does REKT share company profits with its holders? No. However, if REKT Brands and Rekt Drinks becomes a globally recognised brand, will REKT appreciate in price? The answer is almost certainly yes, not to mention Rekt Brands Inc. has also been repurchasing REKT from drinks revenues.

Brand coins as a proxy for brand value

A couple years ago I wrote What is the Value of a Brand, making the argument that owning a NFT does not represent ownership in a company, but rather ownership in the brand of a company. And as 99.9% of NFT collections trended to 0, the collections that still hold some degree of value today confirm that.

To emphasize that point, I pulled a chart from the most valuable brands in 2022 and what % that amount was compared to the company’s market cap.

Analyses like the above prove that brand value:

• Can be quantified

• Actually is valuable

• Grows as the company grows

OSF’s argument with REKT as a brand coin adds one more point to the concept brand value: it can be represented by a token.

Where can brand coins go?

OSF is on to something intriguing with the positioning of REKT as a brand coin. If we’re on the path of tokenizing everything from stocks to Pokemon cards to memes, why can’t you tokenize something like a brand as well?

And if we lean into the concept of brand loyalty and fandom, brand coins (along with NFTs) are a great vehicle to symbolize precisely that. The amount you hold represents how much of a fan you are, based on a combination of how early you were and/or how much you’ve purchased. There’s no ‘real’ value in the coin, and there is no explicit utility in the practical sense.

This is no different than collecting memorabilia, trading cards, or Pop Mart Labubu’s (all the rage right now), but in a digital fungible format.

Source

I don’t expect brand coins to start spawning out of nowhere like your 59848922th animal memecoin, or another NFT collection promising to be better than all the rest. In fact, I think very few will be able to pull it off in the way REKT has due to investor considerations, speculation, and execution risk for the token itself.

One thing’s for sure though. The concepts of brand loyalty and fandom are evolving, and brand coins are pushing the edges of what they can look like.

Polymarket's experiments with awareness and gamification

As Polymarket’s posts periodically make their way to my newsfeed, I’ve noticed that their cotent strategy has diversified to stay top of mind as the leading prediction market ($800M+ in monthly volume still!).

Highlighting user behavior

Last month, Polymarket’s account showcased a user who held ‘No’ positions on almost everything with lifetime profit of $2M+.

Although this user’s ‘only no’ strategy was quickly debunked, the post was already blessed by the algorithm gods and the brand account cheekily replied to the callout.

User profiles, positions, and performance are public, so Polymarket has another category of content to post to keep things fresh.

Clickbait prediction market titles

The vast majority of Polymarket prediction markets have clear titles, such as ‘NBA Champion’, ‘Fed decision in June?’, or ‘Poland Presidential Election’. However, there was one that caught my eye last month, “Nothing Ever Happens”.

Although this post was nowhere near as viral as the previous example, this one got me to click on the link to see what the hell this meant. Turns out this prediction market was essentially a parlay (multi-condition bet) that several events would not happen, hence the title.

The market was popular enough that Polymarket created a new May edition with different conditions.

Controversial topics: Prisoner parlays

Last week, 10 inmates escaped a New Orleans prison, with 5 of them remaining at large. What did Polymarket do? Launch a prediction market and post about it of course.

Although the prediction market itself has very little volume ($12k at the moment), the post went viral (and is currently the pinned post on the brand account) because of the topic and how it turned into something that could be bet on.

The post is distasteful for some while entertaining for others, and underscores the reality that you really can bet on anything. And in the attention game, controversy wins.

Polymarket’s content strategy continues to impress me with their creative approach towards promoting topics and gamifying them, especially in a vertical that has historically been more vanilla (they’ve been experimenting with this for a while). It’s a moat that seems like they’ll hold onto for a while.

See you next week!