Azuki is caught in a crisis of trust and NFT is sold off

On May 10, a blog published by the founder of the well-known NFT project Azuki ZAGABOND. ETH caused an uproar.

In his article titled "Builder's Journey", he revealed that he had created three NFT projects, CryptoPhunks, Tendies and CryptoZunks, but later abandoned these projects for various reasons, and finally created Azuki.

The original intention of ZAGABOND.ETH is to introduce his own journey of continuous entrepreneurship in Web3, and to express that his previous failures taught him valuable experience, which in turn contributed to Azuki's success. However, after this article spread to the encryption community, it caused people to criticize it.

Some people questioned that ZAGABOND.ETH is a liar, thinking that he "betrayed the community" and participated in three Rug Pulls projects. "Rug Pulls" refers to the malicious behavior of the project party to lure early investors to inject funds and then abandon the project.

Affected by this, the floor price of the Azuki NFT series dropped from nearly 20 ETH to 10 ETH at one point, which was cut in half. As of 4:00 pm on May 10, the floor price of Azuki rose to 15.5 ETH, which was still more than 20% lower than the intraday high.

After the founder revealed that his entrepreneurial history revealed his shortcomings, the Azuki project fell into a crisis of trust, and the community consensus was being lost, which also planted variables for its future development.

The founder of Azuki revealed that he had abandoned three NFT projects

In the past few months, the Azuki NFT project consisting of 10,000 Japanese anime-style avatars has been very popular. With its original genes and sophisticated production style, the Azuki series has quickly become one of the blue-chip projects in the NFT field, and its market value ranks among the NFT rankings Top ten, and rapidly expanding its own IP popularity.

Azuki series of NFTs are widely welcomed by the market due to the Japanese comic style

However, a "self-disclosure scandal" by the founder suddenly fermented, causing Azuki to fall into a crisis of trust.

On May 10th, the founder of Azuki, ZAGABOND.ETH, published an article titled "Journey of the Builder" on the social platform. The failure experience of three projects. Unexpectedly, these experiences caused an uproar in the encryption community.

ZAGABOND.ETH wrote that his initial project was CryptoPhunks, which is a collection of NFTs created by imitating CryptoPunks . He claimed to be attracted by the talent of CryptoPunks, but not sure about some of the decisions made by his parent company (Larva Labs) at the time, so he started to build CryptoPhunks to prompt the community to think about the copyright rules of Web3.

This article shows that after the release of CryptoPunks, Larva Labs initiated multiple deletion requests on the grounds of copyright infringement, resulting in the series being removed and re-listed on OpenSea several times. "Because CryptoPhunks has always been a community-driven project, (the team) handed over the 'reins' to the community to achieve decentralization," said ZAGABOND.ETH. Since handing over the project to community leaders in July 2021, the team has No further indirect or direct involvement in the project.

Soon, ZAGABOND.ETH launched another project called Tendies. According to the introduction, this is a unique "chicken" NFT project based on a lottery system. But the life of the project was even more short-lived, with Azuki’s founder stating that despite best efforts, only 15% of the project was minted, “they can only take us so far.” Tendies were quickly abandoned.

Subsequently, ZAGABOND.ETH decided to continue to build projects around the concept of CryptoPunks, and he created CryptoZunks, a customizable PFP product that supports holders to continuously "roll back" on the chain to change the characteristics of NFT. However, according to ZAGABOND.ETH, the limitations of the project were quickly revealed, because the Gas cost of Ethereum stifled the product experience. Ultimately, CryptoZunks also failed after some team members left.

ZAGABOND.ETH said that these three failed projects provided him with valuable experience. CryptoPhunks taught him the magic of storytelling; Tendies taught him the importance of original ideas; CryptoZunks told him that no matter how good the product is, Gas cannot be ignored The impact of fees on product experience.

"Azuki would not be what it is today without the lessons learned from our previous projects." ZAGABOND.ETH obviously wanted to express that the above-mentioned failures have contributed to Azuki's success, but the experience of abandoning three projects one after another in just one year , so that he was accused by many encryption people.

The Twitter KOL @ZachXBT, known as "Encryption Detective", posted a sarcasm, "So Web3.0 means abandoning three projects in less than a year?"

Someone also charged ZAGABOND.ETH as a "liar", saying that he had betrayed the community and participated in three Rug Pulls projects. "Rug Pulls" refers to the malicious behavior of the project party to lure early investors to inject funds and then abandon the project.

With the release and dissemination of the article, ZAGABOND.ETH was caught in a wave of verbal criticism, and Azuki was also involved in the haze.

Loss of trust, Azuki's floor price cut in half

ZAGABOND.ETH's personal blog was quickly noticed by the Azuki community. Although the founder repeatedly emphasized in the article that Azuki is the team's vision for the future of Web3, distrust has already grown among Azuki NFT holders.

The secondary market data reflects the loss of consensus in the Azuki community. On May 10, the floor price of Azuki dropped rapidly from nearly 20 ETH to a minimum of 10 ETH, which was almost cut in half. As of 4:00 p.m. that day, the floor price of Azuki rose to 15.5 ETH, which was still more than 20% lower than the intraday high.

According to the data from NFTGo at the same time, in the past 24 hours, the transaction volume of Azuki series NFT increased by 1129%, of which there were 665 buyers and 726 sellers, which caused the number of Azuki holders to drop by 1.41%. During this time, the NFT collection experienced the most change of hands in nearly a month.

Azuki Series NFT Holders Decrease

Apparently, ZAGABOND.ETH's successive abandonment of three projects has affected the confidence of Azuki holders. Some people worry that at some point in the future, once Azuki becomes unprofitable, the team is likely to abandon the project and leave.

It is worth noting that Azuki emphasized the value of "community first" in the official introduction, saying that everything starts with the community, and giving up the community means Azuki's failure. Put it first. The core team provides resources and guidance to the entire community.”

In the eyes of skeptics, after ZAGABOND.ETH "exposed its scandal", this declaration is particularly ironic. "Given the team has many previous records of betraying the community, this commitment seems worthless."

According to the official plan released by Azuki, in the future, it also plans to develop offline streetwear brand stores around its own IP, hold live events such as meetups and music festivals, and create metaverse games. However, because ZAGABOND.ETH stated in the article that it "realizes the importance of storytelling", some community members are also skeptical about whether the above plan can be implemented.

Under the criticism of the encryption community, ZAGABOND.ETH came forward to respond that he had fulfilled all the promises for those failed NFT series, "Of course I hope they succeed, but unfortunately the product does not match the market, but this does not mean that they It's Rug."

This response did not change people's views on ZAGABOND.ETH, and the controversy surrounding him and Azuki is still fermenting. At the same time, why ZAGABOND.ETH came forward to expose the experience of abandoning the project has also become a topic of concern. After all, he is unlikely to be unaware that these words will have a negative impact on Azuki.

In this regard, Twitter KOL @0xHustler broke the news that there were rumors that the CoolCats NFT team was going to expose the founder of Azuki, so he was forced to publicly announce these past events. However, as of press time, this information has not been confirmed by both parties.

In any case, the self-exposure of ZAGABOND.ETH revealed some inside stories of the NFT industry. That is to say, the same person or team may issue multiple NFT projects. At the beginning of the release, these projects often have great declarations, but once the project progresses unsatisfactorily, the project party may quickly withdraw and leave the mess to the community. Therefore, some NFT players reminded that investors should do research before buying NFT, and should not pay too much attention to what the project said, but should pay more attention to what it did, and refrain from falling into the hype atmosphere.

For Azuki, after experiencing this wave of farce, the community consensus will inevitably be lost, which also bury the variables for its future development.