Author: Nancy, BlockingNews
As one of the most stable blue-chip projects in the NFT bear market, Azuki announced the launch of its new series, Azuki Elementals, making many investors unable to contain their excitement. The more than one-minute-long anime promotional video raised expectations to the max.
At zero o’clock on June 29th, Azuki Elementals did not disappoint, selling out entirely within 15 minutes of the pre-sale phase, even before the public auction window had opened. However, Azuki still failed to break the curse of “opening the image and immediately crashing,” and the community began to question the quality of the new series, including concerns about high similarity and wrong editions. The outside world began to suspect Azuki of fundraising by promising too much and worried about the future prospects of the project.
The total supply of Azuki’s new work, Azuki Elementals, is 20,000, and according to STEAMBOY, a founding member of the Azuki team, the idea behind Azuki Elementals is based on the Azuki origin and creating something new and amazing based on that foundation. The series involves four elements: earth, fire, lightning, and water, each with its unique properties.
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Azuki Elementals was released on June 28th at 0:00 Beijing time and will be sold in three stages according to Azuki holders, BEANZ holders, and public sales. The casting price for the first two stages is 2 ETH, and the third stage will use the Dutch auction method, with the price dropping by 0.1 ETH every 5 minutes until sold out.
However, Azuki Elementals sold out entirely within 15 minutes of the pre-sale, with the team receiving 20,000 ETH. And according to 0xScope monitoring, just over one minute after the new series was sold out, the Azuki team transferred all the received 20,000 ETH (approximately US$37.5 million) in multiple transactions to the multi-signature address starting with 0x2ae6.
Looking at the NFT market, many projects constantly release new series, but most of them cannot escape the fate of high expectations and low performance. Azuki is no exception. As the image was officially opened, holders discovered that Azuki Elementals was a large-scale crash of buyer’s show, with a significant gap between the promotional video and the actual content. Azuki Elementals openly copied their previous work, Azuki, and had a high degree of similarity with new NFT releases, leading many to believe that this was not a new project, but an “increase in issuance” by Azuki.
Twitter user @Andrew Riley said that so far, five identical copies have been found, some of which have not updated their metadata on the exchange. In response, Azuki co-founder 2PMFLOW.ETH said, “This is a technical problem, where some token metadata was incorrectly processed due to outdated event logs from data providers caused by Ethereum block reorganization. We are restoring the correct images and metadata.”
In addition, many investors also received “wrong version” NFTs due to problems with the frontend, and the opening time was incorrect. The content quality was so rough that it is clear that the team’s quality control is very lax.
As a result, the prices of Azuki series NFTs have all fallen. NFTSCAN data shows that the average price of Azuki has fallen by more than 24.7% in the past 24 hours; the average price of BEANZ has fallen by more than 28.4%. According to OpenSea data, the prices of Azuki Elementals and Azuki Elemental Beans are both below the issue price, with the former falling by about 13% and the latter by 15%.
However, some members pointed out that the backend technology of the Azuki Elemental sale was better, with lower batch casting gas and no gas war, and it also demonstrated strong community purchasing power.
In the face of community criticism, Azuki co-founder location tba’s apology also avoided the main issue. “The Azuki Elementals casting experience did not meet Azuki’s standards, and I want to clarify what happened during the presale and some ideas. We underestimated the time needed for Azuki and BEANZ holders to purchase in the first and second stages of the presale, and we should have extended the duration to more than 10 minutes to provide enough buffer in case of any problems (there were indeed problems). Next, our website is still hosted by Vercel to ensure that we can handle the expected load. Our estimate was wrong, and I take personal responsibility for what happened. The presale window should have been extended.”
However, the community is not buying this inadequate apology. Cryptocurrency fund NDV co-founder and Azuki whale Christianeth said, “It is not wise to destroy a project worth $1 billion (and the most loyal community on earth) in order to gain $38 million in profit. I am willing to offer $40 million to buy the entire company.”
Some netizens joked that “Azuki seems to have no liquidity in the secondary market, and has changed to a way to exit from the primary market”, “Azuki has launched a flat replacement style” and other comments. In addition, many netizens even played the “let’s find fault together” meme.
At present, Azuki’s team’s year-long delivery quality is shaking its user trust, and this has also laid down variables for its future development. At this stage, the lack of innovation and sincerity in the nesting gameplay is causing the NFT community to lose interest and trust, with BAYC in the front and Azuki in the back. The consensus within the community is that the main factor determining the sustainability of NFT projects is whether the brand follows the development path of identity recognition that brings premium, so as to better gain user trust.
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