Azuki's new work played the "finding fault game", earning nearly 38 million US dollars in 15 minutes, and a wave of selling came under the crisis of trust

By Nancy, PANews

As one of the most stable blue-chip projects in the NFT bear market, Azuki announced the launch of the new series Azuki Elementals, which made many investors excited, and the more than one minute-long animation promotional video fully fulfilled expectations.

At 0:00 on June 29, Azuki Elementals really lived up to expectations. Without opening the public auction window, they were all sold out within 15 minutes of the pre-sale session. However, Azuki still failed to break the curse of “opening the picture and plummeting”, followed by the community’s doubts about the quality of its new series, such as high similarity and wrong version, and the outside world began to question Azuki’s fundraising. suspected and worried about the future prospects of the project.

Azuki’s new work, Azuki Elementals, has a total of 20,000 pieces. According to the introduction of STEAMBOY, a member of Azuki’s founding team, the idea of Azuki Elementals is to build on the roots of Azuki and create something new and amazing based on that foundation. The series Involving the 4 elements of Earth, Fire, Lightning and Water, each realm has its own uniqueness.

The sale of Azuki Elementals will start at 0:00 on June 28, Beijing time, and will be carried out in three stages: Azuki holders, BEANZ holders and public sales. Among them, the casting price of the first two stages is 2 ETH, and the third stage adopts the method of Dutch auction, and the price drops by 0.1 ETH every 5 minutes until it is sold out.

But Azuki Elementals were all sold out within 15 minutes of the pre-sale, that is, the team’s income was 20,000 ETH. According to 0xScope monitoring, the Azuki team transferred all the 20,000 ETH (about 37.5 million U.S. dollars) obtained in multiple transactions to the multi-signature address starting with 0x2ae6 more than a minute after the new series were all sold.

Looking at the NFT market, there are many projects that continue to release new series of dolls, but most of them cannot escape the end of word of mouth, and Azuki has not escaped. With the official opening of the picture, the holders found that Azuki Elementals is a large-scale rollover scene of the buyer show, which is too different from the promotional film. Azuki Elementals copied its own homework openly, which is highly similar to the content of the previous Azuki and the new NFT. Saying that this is a new project, it is better to say that it is Azuki’s “additional issue”.


Twitter user @Andrew Riley said that so far, 5 sets of identical replicas have been found, some of which have not updated their metadata on the exchange. In response, Azuki co-founder 2PMFLOW.ETH responded, “This is a technical glitch, because the event log from the data provider was outdated due to Ethereum block reorganization, causing some Token metadata to be mishandled. We are restoring the correct images and metadata."


In addition, many investors also received the wrong version of NFT due to problems in the front-end, which led to the wrong opening time. The quality of such rough content is enough to show that the quality control of the team is not strict.


Affected by this, the prices of Azuki series NFTs all fell across the board. According to NFTSCAN data, in the past 24 hours, the average price of Azuki fell by more than 24.7%; the average price of BEANZ fell by more than 28.4%. According to OpenSea data, the current prices of Azuki Elementals and Azuki Elemental Beans are both broken, with the former falling by about 13% and the latter by 15%.

However, some members pointed out that the back-end technology in the release process of Azuki Elemental is relatively excellent, the batch casting Gas is low, and Gas War has not been triggered, and it also shows a strong community purchasing power.

In the face of community criticism, Azuki co-founder location tba’s apology also evaded the important point, “Azuki Elementals casting experience did not meet Azuki’s standards, I want to clarify what happened during the pre-sale and some thoughts. We underestimated Azuki and BEANZ holders The time required for pre-sale phase 1 and phase 2, we should extend the duration to more than 10 minutes to have enough buffer in case of any issues (and they do exist). Next, our website is still powered by Vercel Managed to make sure we could handle the expected load. Our estimates were wrong and I take personal responsibility for what happened, the pre-sale window should have been extended.”

But the community did not pay for this insincere apology. Encryption fund NDV Lianchuang and Azuki big man Christianeth said, "It is unwise to destroy a $1 billion project (and the most loyal community on earth) for a profit of $38 million. I would like to bid $40 million to buy the entire company .”

Some netizens jokingly said, “Azuki seems to have no liquidity in the secondary market, and has changed the means of exiting from the primary market”, “Azuki has launched a flat replacement for everyone”, etc. In addition, many netizens even started playing A meme of “Let’s find fault together”.



Judging from the current situation, the year-long delivery quality of the Azuki team is shaking the trust of its users, which has also planted variables for its future development. At this stage, the lack of novelty and sincerity in Matryoshka is causing the NFT community to lose interest and trust. There was BAYC before and Azuki later. The community consensus is the main factor for the durability of NFT projects. Only when the brand follows the development path of premium value brought about by the sense of identity can it better gain the trust of users.