Blue Chip NFTs 101 – Azuki, a new kind of brand for the future…and a scandal

The idea behind Azuki is to mix NFT culture with anime-style drawings, with a global community working together behind the scenes. Which is phenomenal. Azuki defines itself as a “decentralized brand for the metaverse.” This brand’s main product is a collection of 10K anime-style avatars in NFT form. The collection is also called Azuki and was at the start one of the NFT room’s biggest success stories…

… until admissions and revelations from one of the project’s creators cast a shadow over Azuki as a whole.

Let’s go through the history of the project, its features and the revelations that changed it all.

Azuki’s origin story

The project has been around since January 12, 2022. The team behind Azuki is Chiru Labs, their slogan is “Born in Los Angeles. Build for the metaverse.” Most of the members use pseudonyms and keep their identities private. A few use their real name, like Azuki’s co-creator and illustrator Arnold Tsang from Toronto, Canada. He is well known for his participation in “Overwatch”, which Wikipedia describes as “a 2016 team-based multiplayer first-person shooter developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment.”

The community behind it is a central part of the project. On Azuki’s website, they use slogans like “A new kind of brand that we build together” and “A brand for the metaverse. By society.” Ownership of one of the 10K Azuki NFTs grants the user access to The Garden. A virtual venue Azuki promises “starts with exclusive streetwear collabs, NFT drops, live events and much more to be revealed over time.”

Azuki is a digital brand. A “decentralized brand of the future”.

At first, it seemed like the NFT collection would catapult them to instant classic status. The initial success made their name recognizable and sent the collection’s floor price into the double digits. At one point it maxed out at 22 ETH. Today the floor price is on Open sea is 7.4 ETH what happened? Whatever the reason, the Azuki collection comes around. It has moved a total volume of 260.2K ETH in transactions so far.

We need some … controversy

The turning point for Azuki was a Twitter room, of all things. May 10, crypto flu Andrew Wang interviewed Zagabond, one of Azuki’s founders, who just like that revealed he was part of a few NFT projects that didn’t end well. It almost sounded like they were a rug cover and people freaked out accordingly. The floor price of the collection began to fall, and it has not yet recovered.

It was a mystery at first, but according to to Cryptoslatethe projects Zagabond was involved in were:

• CryptoPhunks, the original CryptoPunk copycat collection. The first collection to receive a DMCA takedown from Larva Labs. Because of that, CryptoPhunks was removed from OpenSea and Zagabond gave the project to all holders in July 2021.
• Tendies, a project that failed to capture the imagination of NFT culture and shut down in the middle of the minting process.
• CryptoZunks, a collection that defines itself as “the first punks to be generated on-chain with randomized attributes. Each Zunk is guaranteed to be unique from every punk.” Apparently it failed due to Ethereum’s expensive gas fees.

According to Cryptoslate, “Like the first two projects, this failure was also a lesson. Zagabond said that these three projects taught him that “blindly following the NFT meta will not get you very far.” He claims that all the lessons learned from these projects are now applied to make Azuki a success.” None of that helped and the collection’s floor price went down.

The question here is, were these projects cover-ups or simple mistakes with no bad intentions?

ETH price chart for 09/08/2022 on Bitfinex | Source: ETH/USD on TradingView.com

Azuki, built for Metaverse

The definition of metaverse on Azuki’s site is controversial, to say the least.

“The metaverse today is where we currently spend most of our time: Discord + Twitter. How do we amplify this experience for Azuki members? How do we distribute the brand to places that have the most attention today? More importantly, where will the metaverse be about a year+ from now?”

Is simple social media part of the metaverse? How does Azuki not know where the metaverse will be in a year? Other blue-chip NFT pools are already building their version and putting their chips on the table. Is Azuki too late? Or is Chiru Labs just quietly developing? According to the company, they are investigating the possibility of developing a game. “Few teams have the experience and background to build a genuinely great game with mass market appeal and scalability. Even if the core team has the experience, it’s still a big effort.”

The Azuki collection is down but not out. The team appears to have shaken off the stink that Zagabond’s revelations brought, but did so in the midst of a bear market where the entire NFT market is down. Azuki stopped the bleeding. The question is, can they regain and even surpass past glories?

Featured Image: Azuki banner from their site | Charts by TradingView