Azuki faith Collapse

In such a bear market, the new Azuki series "Azuki Elementals" sold out in less than 20 minutes for 1 ETH. In less than 20 minutes, it rolled 20,000 ETH (about $37.406 million), accounting for more than $2 million per minute. After selling out, from Twitter to wechat group chat, everyone is "sigh", some say who said no one is interested in NFT, some say really good ah, the original bear market money is so easy...

A little more than 2 hours later, Azuki Elementals opened the picture, and everyone called it "WTF". Not that the new collection is too good to look at, but that it's goofy - is this an extra release?

How beautiful the vision before opening the picture, how disappointed after opening the picture, many NFT players have moved out of Azuki's promotional animation to ridicule.

Previously, Azuki's spin-off series Beanz made a surprise debut at the end of a party with "Check your wallet." With a successful case full of surprises, the Azuki community and even the market are undoubtedly full of expectations for Azuki Elementals. In particular, Azuki's official push also released a one-minute short animation on June 24, and everyone's appetite for "one bean a year" is definitely suspended by this animation.

Various problems in the sale process have also been criticized by its owners: Dissatisfaction with the White list Mint window being as short as 10 minutes, dissatisfaction with website overload causing Mint to fail, and high duplication of various features with the Azuki generation, holders were also concerned about the potential dilution of Azuki Elementals to the value of the generation …………

Affected by the opening chart, the floor price of Azuki also fell from 12 ETH to 10 ETH at one point, and is currently near the 10 ETH mark, a drop of about 20%. Judging from the sound of social media, the storm Azuki is facing this time will not be less than the negative news of its founder Zagabond's "Rug Pull business".

How much of the Azuki faith is left?

In addition to the Mint time of only ten minutes, resulting in a short time of website traffic overload and direct crash, pictures similar to disguised distribution, the most criticized community is that after the end of the sale, the project side directly transferred 20,000 ETH. The transfer of 20,000 ETH has caused a lot of hot discussion, and many people can not believe that this is a blue-chip NFT team will do the operation. Disappointment and doubt pervaded the community. However, for the statement that the team rolled away 20,000 ETH, the community also pointed out that the team was transferred into a multi-money wallet for security considerations.

On June 25, nftftc co-founder Sibel (@sibeleth) said on social media: "This is the end of NFT... with the two upcoming mints, Azuki and Ether, this bloody market will lose a total of $50m. While we are all playing the 'hot potato' game, I don't think NFT will return for at least another six months. I am sorry for our losses."

KOL 0x Sun (@0x SunNFT) said on Twitter that it is hard to believe that this is the quality of delivery from the Azuki team, and that all unwillingness stems from not understanding. At present, the team has not made any announcement after the opening of the drawing, I do not know how they will respond, if this set of engravings of the original version of the drawing is really all the content of Elementals, and the follow-up neither work nor protect the disc, then this sale can be said to be naked harvest.

Before the Azuki Elementals series was released, Christian 2022.mid (@Christianeth), as a whale with thousands of Ethereum in Azuki and Yuga, thought that Yuga's Ponzi logic was obviously not working. Therefore, from a narrative point of view, I am looking forward to Azuki's story.

In a previous BlockBeats interview with Christian, Christian had put forward his own views on PFP's NFT model: "If a team has no new ideas, no innovation that can drive the community, or no new business model and direction, the next cycle will be difficult. I even think the Azuki narrative is more attractive than the monkey, which allows them to maintain the value of the project when the market mood is low."

Christian, which owns more than 470 BEANZ and 40 Azuki, prepared 1,000 ETH for the sale of Azuki Elementals that night, hoping to maximize the liquidity of the entire NFT market. In the morning, Christian woke up with 682 BEANZ and 410 elementals.

But while many community members had completely lost faith in Azuki, Christian made the decision to "top up his faith." "It's not smart to destroy a billion-dollar project (and the most loyal community on Earth) for $38 million in profits," he tweeted. "I'd offer $40 million for the whole company."

Looking back at the performance of the past three months, regardless of whether it has a blue chip halo, the NFT market has been showing a downward trend. The market value dropped by 23.64%, from 5.1 million ETH to 3.9 million ETH. Looking at the Blue Chip index, although there was a brief rebound between May 31 and June 5, it also followed a downward trend in general - from 85,000 ETH to 75,000 ETH, a decline of 12.22%.

Many blue-chip NFTS have not escaped the baptism of the bear market:

Moonbirds
Moonbirds, one of the fastest rising NFTS in the bull market, went from 2.5 ETH at launch to 40 ETH in a matter of weeks. But Moonbirds, as they're called, haven't turned the community's expectations for it into consensus. Not only the scandal of its former COO, but also the decision to change the NFT to CC 0 in spite of the community and the concept of soft staking is another reason why Moonbirds is losing ground.

Doodles
The hiring of Pharrell Williams, now LV's creative director of men's wear, failed to save Doodles, who had become estranged from the community. The fact that the Noodles co-founder chose not to follow the crowd hurt the Doodles community, which had accused the Doodles team of inaction and setting a threshold for Discord, The decision to move to the Flow chain in early 2023 completely exploded the discontent of the Dooles community, after which its floor price fell from 7 ETH all the way to 1.5 ETH, a far cry from the high of 22 ETH.

BAYC
Even BAYC (BoredApeYachtClub), the king of the NFT field, did not withstand the pressure this year, and its floor price has fallen sharply, from the peak of 150 ETH to 40 ETH, and even once fell to near 34 ETH. The decline over the past week has reached 14.92 per cent. Despite the announcement that a new game, HV-MTL Forge, will be released on June 29, it has not brought about a significant rebound in BAYC's declining floor prices. By watching BAYC's whales, it is possible to glimpse the reasons for its dramatic decline.

Franklin, who held more than 60 BAYC at its peak, sold most of BAYC because of his numerous investment mistakes, which repeatedly caused panic in the community and even ended up deleting Twitter and withdrawing from the Internet. As the spokesperson of BAYC Wild, Huang Licheng has also expressed dissatisfaction with BAYC's parent company Yuga Labs, saying that the architecture of ApeCoin DAO has certain problems and is too centralized, which leads to the realization of DAO's investment vision. After several "roller coaster" trading sessions on NFT trading platform Blur, Huang finally chose to sell BAYC, selling BAYC several times in June, and so far, only one BAYC in his main account.

In contrast, Azuki and Beanz were undoubtedly "much stronger" and even bucked the market trend and managed to rise to the top of the blue-chip list. Azuki, which peaked at more than 30 ETH at the peak of the bull market, even rose to 17 ETH a few days ago. Not only that, the community atmosphere of the Azuki community is also a model of extreme activity and cohesion in a bear market, thanks to the strong community support behind it and the appeal of the product. After the Elements went on sale, the community seemed to lose faith in the "last blue chip."

Of course, there are still some dark horses in the NFT circle in 2023, such as Milady and Punk who are unusually strong and "main do not do things". With the gradual decline of BAYC, Punk returned to the throne of blue chip NFT with the highest unit price. Milady has even been "flattered" by Elon Musk. Pudgy Penguins is another way, after completing the 9 million financing led by 1kx, announced that it will break the circle by passing its IP to the real world, and the surrounding Pudgy Toys launched soon after sold 20,000 pieces in 48 hours. It even won the Toy Insider 2023 Best Summer Toy Award.

Azuki's delivery results this time are really very disappointing. After all, you got paid $37.4 million, but even in the image itself there were some rudimentary errors. NFT players "dig into the details" to find these low-level errors and ridicule, but also reflects how angry and disappointed everyone is.

Making money is so easy, has Azuki forgotten that the purpose of taking money from users is to do something? Regardless of the hype logic, the first picture that says you want to do IP is the same as an independent game that launched crowdfunding on Kickstarter. Indeed, there are many people who buy only for Degen, but as a project side, you just to put a "gambling game", not only buy the money of the chip but also use the royalties to pump the user's water? Azuki generation up to now, sales and royalties have been enough, how much money did you spend on content creation that you now have to ask users for money?

The value of the "shell" of NFT has been squeezed to the last few times, and the distrust between the project side and the user may be worn down after a few times like Azuki.

To put it bluntly, NFT is nothing more than a blockchain technology implementation, a map because of the use of blockchain technology to store and sell to such a high price, there is a betting component, but also love NFT people for your vision of a support and trust. The biggest pain point with small image NFT is that it's essentially just an "opening image", it doesn't have much more content, so we have to create content and explore things like IP on top of that content.

Other cultures that have established business models early on have good content that can both stabilize stock and attract incremental growth. Musicians, for example, can grind a sword like a universal youth hotel for ten years, and an album is pigeon after pigeon, because even in the gap period of content creation, people can also taste the previous work and consume it. Small picture What can NFT do? Expect everyone to drool over a picture and fantasize about their meta-cosmic selves? We can easily imagine that if Azuki was not an NFT, would you spend even $100 on the online marketplace if you saw these pictures? After you bring it home, how long will you be interested in it?

So we will find that it is difficult to do small picture NFT community, fresh strength in the past in addition to talk about today up tomorrow down, really no words. You can take so much money, everyone is hoping that you can have a breakthrough, in fact, your breakthrough is not yet delivered. Website updates, clothes do a few, party held a few, more than 1 year has passed, this and you raised funds really match?

We have gone through a complete investment cycle, many projects have been falsified, and people understand the direction of the market. Looking back at BAYC's early days of hot full commercial rights IP licensing, the community and artists are integrating BAYC into a variety of ideas: beer, neon signs, merchandise, coffee, bars, burgers, stories, comics... BAYC has spawned numerous artistic spin-offs. But somewhere along the line, BAYC changed, and the cultural output it had started to lose.

In this context, Christian 202.mid (@Christianeth), co-founder of the NextGen Foundation and WeirdoGhostGang, believes that in the next cycle, new blue chip NFT projects must have two characteristics: One is to attract more outsiders to join the community through cultural export; The second is that we must move from virtual to real, with real products and sustained business models, so that everyone can see the value of Web3 and what it does. Christian says that's why he chose to invest in The Weirdo Ghost Gang.

It's time to go back and let go of the shell. We're not doing anything fancy, just storing a picture with blockchain technology and struggling to explore new possibilities. If you can make money quickly and in large quantities by doing NFT projects, or just hype and make other things that have nothing to do with me, from the project side to the user must only be in this circle of the old narrative, it is really difficult to move forward.