Flojo

Flojo is a Singapore-founded sparkling functional beverage brand that has embedded a Solana-based loyalty and community-funding layer into its consumer product from the start. Launched in April 2024, it describes itself as the world's first sparkling drink formulated and approved by neuroscientists, and is the first beverage company to orient its go-to-market strategy around on-chain incentives rather than bolting crypto on afterward.

The Product

Flojo cans combine yerba mate with a blend of adaptogens and nootropics — including reishi mushroom, rhodiola rosea, lion's mane, echinacea, American ginseng, and cacao seed — alongside B vitamins. The formula is designed to support cognitive focus and mental clarity without triggering the overstimulation associated with high-caffeine energy drinks. Caffeine is sourced exclusively from yerba mate and black tea, and the drink uses real fruit juice with stevia rather than artificial sweeteners. Available flavors include Peach Lychee, Mango Yuzu, and Guava Passionfruit. The North American formulation contains 48 mg of natural caffeine per can; the original Singapore market version carried a lower dose of 18 mg.

Flojo launched commercially at Singapore's FHA Food and Beverage trade show and began selling through its website and via Shopee and Lazada. By May 2025 it opened a presale for the U.S. and Canada market, with California retail distribution through stores including Irvine Ranch Market, Berkeley Bowl, Piedmont Grocery, Farmer Joe's, and Market Hall Foods.

Founding Team

The company was co-founded by three people. Paul Tan, who serves as CEO, is a former FX trader in corporate banking whose experience with the demands of finance — combined with frustration at existing energy drink options — drove him to build Flojo. Cherie Lui, his partner, left a regional marketing management career to co-found the brand and leads its commercial strategy. Dr. Christine Wong is a Canadian-based neuroscientist and childhood friend of Lui who joined as co-founder and scientific lead; the formulation was developed with her team's proprietary screening platforms combining laboratory analysis and AI. The company raised USD 600,000 in angel funding at launch.

Paul Tan's background includes active participation in the Solana and broader crypto community. Flojo has targeted crypto-native audiences as an early adopter demographic, sponsoring crypto events in Hong Kong and positioning itself at the intersection of the wellness and Web3 spaces.

Solana Loyalty Layer: SPARK Points

Flojo's on-chain loyalty program operates under the name SPARK. Rather than accumulating points in a centralized corporate database, customers earn tokenized on-chain points that live in a self-custodied Solana wallet. The earn rate is straightforward: one dollar spent on Flojo equals one SPARK point. Additional SPARK can be earned by referring friends to the brand or by creating and sharing content about the product — a share-to-earn mechanic the company describes as content for SPARK.

The program runs on Solana using the Octane relayer, an open-source gasless transaction infrastructure. Octane allows users to interact with Solana without needing to hold SOL to pay transaction fees, removing a significant onboarding barrier for mainstream consumers who are not crypto-native. Wallet abstraction sits on top of Octane to give customers a Web2-style account experience while their loyalty points are actually held on-chain. Whether SPARK points will carry direct exchange value beyond brand loyalty perks has not been formally specified in publicly available documentation at the time of writing; the company has described them as potentially tradeable digital assets.

FlojoSOL: Creator Coin on Sanctum

In parallel with SPARK, Flojo became one of 17 launch partners for Sanctum's Creator Coins program, which entered beta in December 2024. Sanctum is a Solana liquid staking infrastructure provider that introduced Creator Coins as a mechanism allowing creators and brands to raise community capital using liquid staking token mechanics without asking supporters to permanently sacrifice liquidity.

FlojoSOL is Flojo's Creator Coin. Supporters deposit SOL into FlojoSOL and receive FlojoSOL tokens in return at a 1:1 ratio with SOL. The staked SOL earns standard Solana network staking yield; under the Creator Coins model, that yield is directed to Flojo rather than to the depositor. In exchange for pledging their staking yield, holders accumulate Seeds — a loyalty-point currency denominated at 100 Seeds per dollar's worth of staking rewards contributed. Seeds can be redeemed for Flojo products, services, or exclusive community access. FlojoSOL holders retain full liquidity: the tokens can be exchanged back for SOL at a 1:1 ratio at any time through Sanctum's unified liquidity layer, with no lockup period.

This model is non-predatory in structure. Holders do not risk principal, and Flojo does not issue a speculative token whose value depends on secondary market demand. The economics resemble a patronage arrangement where the cost to the supporter is only the opportunity cost of their staking yield. Within three days of the Creator Coins beta launch across all 17 participating creators, the program collectively attracted over 1,800 SOL in combined deposits.

Ecosystem Fit and Positioning

Flojo sits at an unusual intersection: a regulated consumer goods company using Solana as its primary loyalty infrastructure rather than as a speculative fundraising tool. It is not a DeFi protocol or an NFT project — it is a beverage company that has chosen on-chain mechanics for customer retention and community building. SPARK points tie direct product purchases to blockchain-based rewards, while FlojoSOL gives the Solana staking community a way to financially support the brand using yield rather than capital.

Flojo's reliance on Solana is partly a product of the founder's crypto background and partly a pragmatic infrastructure choice: Octane's gasless relayer and Sanctum's LST rails make Solana meaningfully practical for consumer-facing applications where users cannot be expected to manage gas fees manually. The brand describes itself as the first sparkling energy drink to launch Web3-first, framing on-chain loyalty as a core product feature rather than a marketing add-on.

No public security audits of the SPARK smart contracts have been identified in available sources. The Creator Coins infrastructure itself is provided by Sanctum, which maintains Solana's largest unified LST liquidity layer. The FlojoSOL program was in public beta at the time of Sanctum's December 2024 launch, with program mechanics still developing alongside Sanctum's broader creator monetization roadmap.