Original Author: Morii
Original source: Techub News
The Azuki community is going through a moment of life and death.
At 0:00 Beijing time on June 28, holders of the Azuki Chinese community were waiting to buy the official new NFT Azuki Elementals (hereinafter referred to as Elementals), while chatting on Twitter space, but gradually no one spoke.
The person in charge of the Azuki Chinese community @Christine later tweeted that he refreshed the screen 200 times before finally arriving at mint; Twitter user @ ETH also said that his page kept reporting errors. Almost everyone who participated in the presale encountered the same problem. Some people attribute it to a technical failure, and some people think that the team deliberately pinched the pre-sale window within 10 minutes, in fact, to make everyone roll. And once there is a technical failure, 10 minutes can't solve any problems at all.
This is just the beginning of this disaster.
At 9:15 PT, Elementals prepared three rounds of sales and sold them out in 15 minutes, earning the team $38 million.
However, with the announcement of the NFT art image of Elementals, buyers found that it was highly similar to the Azuki series, causing an uproar in the community. The floor price of the Elementals series dropped rapidly from the initial 2ETH to a minimum of 1.32 ETH; the Azuki series was also affected, causing the price fall.
On June 29, on-chain analysts detected that Azuki had transferred 20,000 ETH(approximately $37 million) from the sale of the Elementals series to Coinbase Prime.
@Christine tweeted that he emptied all Azuki.
Giant @Christian2022.mid with 40+ Azuki and 470+ Beanz says it's not wise to ruin a billion dollar project for a $38M profit. He also joked that he would pay $40 million to buy the entire company.
why?
Take a look at Azuki's art vs. Elementals' and you might get an idea of what they're talking about.
The first group is Azuki, and the second group is Elementals. The art styles of the two groups are exactly the same. At first glance, they thought they were the same series. If you like this kind of art style, mint one and set it as your social avatar, others will not be able to tell whether you are holding Azuki or Elementals. And their prices are completely different. The floor price of the former is 17ETH before the pre-sale, and the initial floor price of the latter is 2ETH. This greatly diluted the value of Azuki, and the moment Elementals debuted, it triggered a sell-off and a price crash. This then caused the trust of the holders in the community to collapse.
KOL @0xSun said that if there is only this picture and no other actions, I feel cheated.
KOL @Xin.Sats provides Azuki team with crisis PR tips in a playful tone.
But the launch of Elementals was originally something that NFT players have been looking forward to in the bear market.
First-line blue chip Azuki
Azuki is a Japanese avatar NFT project. It was launched by the developer Chiru Labs in 2022. Because of its oriental aesthetic art style, it was sold out in just a few minutes once it was launched, raising more than 29 million US dollars. The NFT project with the largest transaction volume since Bored Ape Yacht.
In April 2022, following the first generation of NFT series Azuki, Chiru Labs launched Beanz NFT, which was endowed with the character of "Azuki's partner". The total number of issued in this series is 20,000, of which 10,000 are AirDrop to holders of Azuki NFT .
Before the launch of Elementals, Azuki and Beanz were the two main brands of Chiru Labs. Chiru Labs mainly focuses on these two brands through IP cooperation, holding offline art experience and other marketing activities to expand community influence
On April 12, Azuki announced the establishment of a strategic partnership with IPX, the parent company of Line Friends, a well-known Korean IP company, to jointly create Beanz NFT IP. Azuki and Beanz NFT floor prices have risen sharply around this time.
In January of this year, Azuki announced the launch of the virtual city "Hilumia" built by the community, where holders can explore and interact in this virtual space. The scenes in the virtual city include the toy store Slowpoke's Toy Haven, the design platform Ember Square, the skateboard community Golden Skate Park, and the opinion collection box Garden Express. As soon as the news came out, the BeanzNFT floor price rose 69% in 24 hours.
Its diverse marketing, community cohesion, and ambition to create an immersive game metaverse make Azuki one of the few phenomenal NFTs that is still growing in the sluggish encryption market. Therefore, the launch of Elementals was once given high expectations by the market.
The design of Elementals is inspired by the four elements of Azuki, earth, fire, lightning and water. The rarity is divided into four levels and sold randomly. The total circulation is 20,000, of which 10,000 AirDrop to Azuki holders, and the remaining 10,000 will be pre-sold on the 27th.
According to the pre-sale rules, holders of the initial NFT series Azuki will participate in the pre-sale from 9:00 Pacific time on June 27, holders of the derivative NFT series Beanz will participate in the pre-sale from 9:10, and 9:20 points into the public sale.
Its sales method follows the Dutch auction model, starting with a price of 2 ETH, and the price will drop by 0.1 ETH every five minutes until 10,000 NFTs are sold out.
Those who participate in the pre-sale must mortgage 2 ETH before mint, and if the minting fee is lower than 2 ETH, the difference will be refunded. In the first and second phases of the pre-sale, Azuki and Beanz holders can mint one corresponding Elementals for each Azuki or Beanz without limit, but in the public sale phase, each wallet can only mint a maximum of 3 Elementals.
"This is our most ambitious artistic endeavor to date, and we're excited to use art and technology to tell the next chapter of Azuki's story," Azuki co-founder Zagabond told the press before the pre-sale took place.
Zagabond's avatar appeared on the screen at the "Follow the Rabbit" event in Las Vegas last Friday, and he asked Azuki's holders to check their wallets to a dynamic background music, sparking excitement. Cheers and screams.
Holder @Charlie G, who participated in the live event, said on Twitter that after Zagabond shouted, he checked his wallet, and there were two things lying in it, one was ElementalsBean (Elementals whose artistic image has not been revealed, similar to opening a blind box), The other is the Elementals Chip, a soul-bound token commemorating the event.
Charlie said that the quality of the trailer launched by Elementals at the Las Vegas event is so high that it cannot be seen from other NFT projects, and its ability to attract attention is also advanced.
However, everyone found that the final product had nothing to do with the promotional film.
@0xSun believes that if this set of re-enacted pictures of the first generation is really all the content of Elementals, and the follow-up will neither do anything nor protect the market, then this release can be said to be a naked harvest.
@Xin.Sats said that he actually sold all the Azuki and Beanz before the pre-sale. The logic is that the release form of Elementals is actually a re-harvesting of old fans, and it does not break the circle to introduce new players and users.
"I prefer Pudge Penguin's approach to selling toys on Amazon to expand users outside the circle. Although it is definitely not comparable to Azuki in terms of the amount of money collected, one is to attract money from within the circle, and the other is to go to Expanding customers outside the circle, I support the latter more in terms of business logic and emotion. Let me add that the price collapse of BAYC is also the result of excessive harvesting of fans. Count how many different series Yuga NFT and Token have sold. A gold-absorbing asset rather than a cash-flow generating asset," Xin.Sats wrote.
Division, Rave and Speculation
The holders of foreign communities are basically in a state of being torn apart, with pros and cons fighting back and forth.
@spiritdao, as one of the well-known spin-off communities in the Azuki ecology, gathered a group of Holy Grail (very rare) holders, and responded in a high-profile manner without the official Azuki team saying: "We have been here, We are not going anywhere. TTP (Trust the process, believe in the process). Let TTP become a new MEME among Azuki believers."
Of course there are people who object: because you have no other choice.
Some holders said that everyone should take a long-term view. Elementals will not replace OG Azuki, and it is not time to sell (OG). The community has done so much and made a mistake exploring Elementals that they should be trusted to fix it.
Another part of the holders objected, fumbling is one thing, but they have already screwed up. This is clearly a cash grab, and if the OGs just support lazy solutions to protect their own interests, the community will die sooner or later.
One thing's for sure, the naysayers say, Azuki has a community as hell, always going the extra mile to justify the team's lack of preparation, good execution and vision.
There are also some holders who are only obsessed with aesthetics and craftsmanship, and don’t care whether the NFT in their hands is depreciating. What he cares most about is the details of the artwork and the emotional value it brings to him.
As a watch collector, @AZhangerator tweeted his thoughts on the new artwork as soon as Elementals was auctioned off.
He analyzed the possibility of cooperation between Elementals and lifestyle brands. He hoped that the Azuki team would boldly use the money they just raised. If they could cooperate with luxury brands like luxury, it might bring new growth to the community and bring back the situation.
Someone even started a "smash" party after getting a new NFT. That is to "shred" the Elementals Bean that mint got without knowing its artistic image, and then get an Elemental, which is similar to the experience of opening a blind box, which actually caused a small carnival on Twitter.
There are also people who speculate decisively in times of crisis. According to reports, NFT collector Huang Licheng spent nearly a thousand ETH to Buy the dip when the Azuki ecological NFT fell across the board. He bought 394 Azuki Elemental Beans at an average price of 1.72 ETH and sold them all at a price greater than 1.98 ETH. At the same time, I bought 18 Azuki at an average price of 8.7 ETH, and sold them all at a price greater than 9.48 ETH.
Late response from the project party
At 6 pm on June 28th, Azuki's official Twitter account finally spoke out. The tweet explained why Elemental was designed in this way, such as wanting to maintain the same style as Azuki while expanding the Azuki universe. They admitted that this was a failed exploration, so they launched yet another new NFT, Green Bean.
Holders who have lost trust in the community do not buy it.
@kalr94: First, you copied elementals from Azuki, now you copy from red bean, just give it a different color. Wow, you really put that $38 million to good use!
@Gee__Gazza: No time for secrecy, you say nothing. Neither solves the problem of art reproductions, nor how Azuki can still retain collectible value, while the value of assets in everyone's hands is declining... Please be honest!
@DaybedNFT: Azuki's next response is to issue another 20,000 horizontally flipped elementals.
Of course believers are still queuing up to reply TTP under the mung bean animation.
On June 29th, according to the monitoring of Ember, an analyst on the chain, Azuki transferred 20,000 ETH(approximately US$37 million) from the sale of his Elementals series to Coinbase Prime about 8 hours ago. It is reported that Coinbase Prime is a prime brokerage platform under Coinbase, which provides cryptocurrency prime brokerage services for institutional clients.
The pros and cons are also battling back and forth under the message:
Con: I want them to enjoy the yacht, I paid the bill for them.
Positive: They will always exchange their minting income for USD, and gambling in the price fluctuations of the crypto market is not an option for a serious project. And they have a company, and they have to pay their employees.
