The founder of the popular Azuki NFT project made a surprising revelation on Monday, causing the project’s floor price to drop significantly.
In a surprising plot twist, one of the four pseudonymous founders of the Azuki NFT project made a startling revelation in a blog post. To say that the shocking admission sent NFT Twitter in a flurry is an understatement.
The Azuki NFT project is one of the most popular NFT collections launched in January. It is the brainchild of Chiru Labs, a Los Angeles startup run by pseudonymous founders Zagabond, location tba, HoshiBoy, and 2pm.flow. Incidentally, Zagabond is the one who made the shocking reveal.
The Azuki NFT Project
The Azuki NFT project consists of 10,000 unique anime avatars. Owners of the NFTs are given access to The Garden, “a corner of the internet where art, community, and culture fuse to create magic.”
In March, the second-rarest NFT from the Azuki collection, Azuki #9605, sold on OpenSea for $1.4 million, making it the highest sale price in the collection’s history. Things seemed to be looking up for the Azuki NFTs. One of their characters, Azuki #40 or Bobu Bean Farmer, even joined a space mission by NASA and SpaceX.
However, all that changed after Zagabond’s revelation on Monday evening.
Zagabond’s Startling Revelation
On Monday, Azuki floor prices dramatically dropped after Zagabond revealed his fraught history with abandoned projects.
In a blog post, Zagabond gave details of his involvement with various projects like Cryptophunks, Tendies, and Cryptozunks. All these projects were left in the lurch by their original founding teams.
“During these formative times, it’s important that the community encourages creators to innovate and experiment,” Zagabond said in the blog post. “Additionally, each experiment comes with key learnings.”
Zagabond tried to make his disclosure more palatable by saying much of Azuki’s success is due to the learnings gleaned from the failures of those three projects. However, his announcement was met with backlash from the broader NFT community, many of whom believed some on-chain sleuthing would reveal the information’s real deal.
The Backlash
Aside from reigniting the issue of NFT founder transparency, an issue which peaked and launched debates in February after the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders’ real identities were revealed, the revelation also caused Azuki’s floor price to plunge.
Azuki’s floor price on OpenSea went down from Ξ 19 (around $45,500) to Ξ 10.9 (roughly $26,100). Nevertheless, it has since rebounded at the time of writing to Ξ 15.5, or roughly $37,100.
Meanwhile, an Azuki NFT holder and writer for a cryptocurrency digital publication with the handle Chicag0x.eth shared his two cents about the issue. In a Twitter post, he shared what he thinks about Zagabond’s revelation and the possible reasons for such.
In a lengthy thread, he said claimed he had mixed reactions about the whole thing, but his post doesn’t, in any way, defend nor judge the issue. According to him, the disclosure was made at such an inopportune time when the bear market was in full stride.
He mentioned two probable reasons for Zagabond’s timing. The first is that Zagabond wanted to control the narrative because he would be exposed by someone he used to work with. The second, Chiru Labs was in talks with big money so that they could take on cash for a percentage of equity in the company, perhaps with one of the prominent venture capitalist (VC) firms with endless pockets.
Chicag0x.eth even implied that getting big VC money often involves emptying skeletons from the closet, and the project abandonment thing was Zagabond’s skeleton. He claimed Yuga Labs went through something similar at the start of the year.
He did say he loves the Azuki NFT project and the community and that he was hopeful Azuki wouldn’t perform a rug pull in the near future. He is hoping Azuki will take its NFT holders into consideration whatever happens.
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