Empathize with the community, defeat the community Azuki and become a Zagabond learning experiment?

Author: Golden Finance Climber

On June 28, the blue-chip NFT project Azuki’s new series “Azuki Elementals” was launched. **A feast that was originally focused on by the community and expected by Holder has become a target of public criticism under the many “magic operations” of the project party. Not only the floor price of the first generation of Azuki fell below 10 ETH, but the new picture even broke. **

Azuki grew rapidly at the beginning of its establishment, and was regarded by the NFT circle as having the possibility of surpassing BAYC. Although it was revealed in May last year that the founder had three failed NFT project experiences, he has come all the way to today under the loyalty of community believers, and the previous valuation has exceeded 1 billion US dollars.

Zagabond once said that he recognized the value of the community in his early career in OX, and built a decentralized decentralized brand and universe by empathizing with the community. Azuki symbolizes that everyone in the community grows together.

However, the performance of the Azuki project team before and after the release of the new series of Elementals reminds me of what Zagabond said again: Crypto Phunks, Tendies, and CryptoZunks are experiments, which are my “learning” experience on the road to creating Azuki.

Ugly eater

At 00:00 on June 28, the new series of NFT project Azuki, Azuki Elemental Beans, officially started selling. Before the sale, Azuki officially made a promotional video to promote it. Many community members were very excited after watching it, excited for the birth of the next Azuki generation brand. For this reason, some large households prepared 1,000 ETH to help out before the sale.

However, what is unexpected is that **Azuki’s new series “Azuki Elementals” was sold out in less than 20 minutes when it was priced at 2 ETH, and the public sale window was closed before many community members bought it. However, after the project party bought 20,000 ETH (approximately 37.406 million U.S. dollars), they transferred all of them to the wallet with the multi-signature address starting with 0x2ae6 in multiple transactions at the first time. **

If the problem is simply that the Azuki team is greedy for money, then the community members will at best despise it. The delivery quality of “Azuki Elementals” that really saddens the community this time is extremely poor. Not only does it hit the first generation, it has nothing to do with the content of the previous promotional video and Banner, and the PFP image presented has serious flaws, such as the character’s mouth shifting, Inexplicable black pixel blocks and so on.

As for technical issues, netizens are unable to complain. Azuki Elementals has multiple NFTs that store the same metadata. For example, after opening a picture, Elementals holders find that their Azuki Elementals NFT is almost identical to other people’s NFTs except for the ID number.

Seeing the poor performance of the Azuki team, Christian, the co-founder of the encryption fund NDV and a big Azuki owner, couldn’t help saying on social media that he would ruin a project worth $1 billion (and the most expensive project on earth) in order to obtain a profit of $38 million. loyal community) is unwise. I’m willing to pay $40 million for the entire company.

Originally drifting away

In May 2022, some community members revealed that Azuki founder Zagabond had participated in other NFT projects before joining Azuki and had Rug Pull behavior. The revelations also revealed that Zagabond lured early investors and then abandoned the project for profit by leaving the project or selling all pre-held funds.

In addition, Zagabond has also been accused of performing NFT wash trading, that is, someone buys and sells the same NFT at the same time to artificially inflate its price.

After the incident was disclosed, the floor price of Azuki plummeted from about 20 ETH to about 11.1 ETH, almost cut in half.

However, Zagabond, the anonymous founder of Azuki, did not immediately make a statement or make a reasonable response, until his family was notified of the threat of harm, and he chose to speak on Twitter Space to explain. But what is surprising is that Zagabond actually chose to leave during the live broadcast and stopped answering questions from netizens.

Although Zagabond later tweeted frankly that he messed up the live broadcast, and handed over all the previous income (including sales income and copyright income) and smart contract private keys in CryptoPhunks and CryptoZunks to the community, and returned all sales income of Tendies to A holder who has been minted, but community members have given a low trust score to the founder’s irresponsible and immature performance.

In order to try its best to eliminate the impact of this incident, Zagabond made a sincere explanation and guarantee in a public post on Mirror. In it he mentioned:

Phunks taught me the important magic behind storytelling.

Tendies teach us the importance of original ideas, rather than chasing ephemeral metadata.

Zunks tells us that no matter how great the product is, the community is looking for new universes, a strong sense of purpose beyond rare features, and unique experiences with Gas optimization.

In addition, Zagabond has publicly emphasized the importance of the community many times. For example, the creation of a community creates a once-in-a-lifetime window to redefine culture, tell stories, and shape the future of media. We were fully aligned in our commitment to making this dream a reality, and thus Azuki’s vision was born.

Another example: “I think the main lesson here is that the community is important, and so is empathy with the community. The power of Web3 is that you can build with the community, and hopefully, by the way community members build and design projects, the community can Be part of a team that builds the brand with the core team. That’s what I’m trying to do with Azuki right now.”

It is precisely because of Zagabond’s early attention to the Azuki community, the co-construction and sharing with members, and the huge amount of faith recharged in advance, that this NFT project has come to today after going through wind and rain.

But “Azuki Elementals” may also be like another sentence Zagabond said, “All valuable things in this world will eventually be tokenized and traded on the public blockchain.”

** Faith collapses, the building will collapse **

After the launch of Azuki’s new series, it can be said that there are all kinds of people. Some people cleared their warehouses, some rushed to raise funds, some accused them, and some were sad. But fortunately, Azuki officials have responded to the outside world many times.

The well-known Azuki holder @Christine Princess sent several tweets expressing his disappointment with the Azuki official and sold all Azuki collections.

There are not a few big investors and Holders who choose to sell Azuki above. The NFT whale with the address starting with 0x6B4fd sold 52 Azuki at a price of 492.56 ETH (about 916,000 U.S. dollars). The sell-off caused the price of Azuki series to continue to fall. As of this writing, the floor price of Azuki Elemental Beans has dropped to 1.45 E.

On the other hand, there are well-known institutions and NFT giant whales actively vying for funds. Andrew Kang, co-founder and partner of encryption venture capital firm Mechanism Capital, holds 299 Azuki and 580 Elementals; Huang Licheng (machibigbrother.eth) bought 394 Elemental Beans at 677.42 ETH and 14 Elementals at 61.37 ETH.

As a high-quality NFT project with unlimited potential and bright prospects, Azuki once hoped to become the image endorsement of the next NFT out of the circle. As a result, the project team encountered multiple blows in the process of building Azuki. as official instagram

Account theft, hacking, founder failures, and more. But fortunately, they have all come over, and this time, the project team does not seem to be ready to stand still.

Azuki co-founder locationtba first tweeted to admit that Azuki Elementals has a major flaw in the casting process. The time required for Azuki and BEANZ holders to pre-sell the first and second phases should be extended to more than 10 minutes.

Then another Lianchuang 2PMFLOW responded to the image collision incident, and said that it was a technical failure, because the metadata of a small number of Tokens were mishandled due to the reorganization of the Ethereum block in the event log of the data provider. The team is working hard to restore the correct images and metadata.

Regarding the issue of Elementals casting and drawing, Azuki announced on the official Discord that the team has clearly heard all the feedback and will release a statement and next plan later.

At present, one of the most advanced solutions is that Azuki may airdrop the “Mung Bean” NFT to the holders on the Internet. Many community members have discovered that the Elemental Beans contract address has deployed a new contract called Green Bean, which means mung beans, and the total number of NFTs is 10,000, which can be transferred and traded.

Conclusion

Azuki, which translates to “red beans” in Japanese, feeds on the “identity subculture” that’s starting to develop in the NFT space as it relates to individuals and their digital avatars. The story is about people growing together - like a seed in a garden, the little bean symbolizes that everyone in this community grows together.

It can be seen from this that Azuki has a decentralization and subversive innovative narrative concept in the Web3 trend compared with previous NFTs. It attaches importance to the community and grows with community members to create its success. But “Azuki Elementals” obviously violated the original intention and philosophy of the project team, and bowed its knees under the test of human greed.

After being mired in a public relations fiasco last May, Zagabond has barely made any public appearances for Azuki. But before leaving he said, “During these formative times, it’s important that the community encourages creators to innovate and experiment. Also, there are important lessons learned from every experiment.”

Just hope that this time, Azuki is no longer a failed experiment of Zagabond, but a lesson learned for his next NFT project.