Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | How is the husband

Recently, Azuki retweeted a tweet from Weeb3 Foundation on the X platform, with the content "Towards an open anime world." Everyone thought this was a retweet similar to a slogan, but careful users found that the account was created in December last year, and the profile wrote "Creating an open anime universe. Supported by the ANIME token."

This inevitably led the community to speculate that Azuki is about to issue coins, and the community is also excited about this. Azuki's NFT holders are also posting on the X platform to celebrate. But there are also a few people who question whether the team is short of money again and hope to make a profit by issuing coins.

Regardless, as a blue-chip project, Azuki's issuance of coins still brings new traffic to the long-silent NFT track. According to NFTGO data, the NFTs related to Azuki series have all seen a surge in prices, with Azuki's floor price rising to 8.2 ETH, an increase of 34.42%; Azuki Elementals' floor price rising to 0.86 ETH, an increase of 50.87%; Azuki Elemental Beans' floor price rising to 1.05 ETH, an increase of 45.83%; and BEANZ Official's floor price rising to 0.69 ETH, an increase of 70%.

As a blue-chip project in the NFT track, Azuki has gone from an amazing start in the early stages of issuance to subsequent outrageous operations, and finally embarked on the path of issuing coins. Next, Odaily Planet Daily will review Azuki's past and analyze the token value of similar projects after issuing coins to speculate on its future path.

Winning respect with its art style, losing people's hearts due to overconsumption of community expectations

On January 12, 2022, Chiru Labs launched a series of anime-inspired profile photo NFTs called Azuki NFT. During the public sale, a total of 8,700 NFTs were issued, with an initial minting price of 1 ETH (approximately $3,379 at the time). Although the MINT price was high, Azuki NFT sold out in just three minutes, generating $29.3 million in revenue.

Azuki NFT quickly gained popularity, with a daily trading volume of over $30 million, and its floor price soared from the initial 1 ETH to 28 ETH in early April.

The creative team behind Azuki NFT is composed of a group of artists and developers from Chiru Labs, with backgrounds in well-known tech companies such as Facebook and Google, and rich experience in the gaming field. The team's vision is to create a unique metaverse brand that will be collectively established and owned by the community's holders.

The total issuance of Azuki NFT is 10,000, including 235 legendary, 745 rare, 180 classic, and 8,840 common NFTs.

Overall, Azuki, with its exquisite Japanese anime style, quickly gained market attention and continuously increased in price, eventually becoming one of the blue-chip NFT representatives in the last bull market, attracting a large number of KOLs to the community at that time.

Subsequently, in April of the same year, Azuki launched the Azuki Beanz series of 20,000 NFTs. Azuki holders could receive Beanz NFTs for free through airdrops. The team hoped to expand its influence and lower the threshold for user participation through this move.

However, on May 12 of the same year, the project fell into a crisis of trust. The founder, Zagabond, revealed his failed entrepreneurial experience and rug-pulled the previous project, which caused concerns about the future development prospects of Azuki among the community. Subsequently, the price of Azuki plummeted from its peak to around 10 ETH.

The community chose to continue to watch, and after experiencing a bear market, most NFTs in the market lacked liquidity, with most NFTs having prices but unable to be sold.

What really caused Azuki to be criticized by everyone was its Azuki Elementals series, which had been hyped for a year. When the community learned that its new series was about to be released, many prepared ETH to MINT the new series of NFTs. This sale was first MINTed by Azuki and Beanz holders, and then publicly sold through a Dutch auction, but it sold out during the Beanz phase. This financing raised 20,000 ETH, injecting a "tonic" into the NFT track during the bear market with such a hot sales scene and large financing.

However, the story always has its ups and downs. After the launch of Azuki Elemental Beans, what caught the eye was the "small pictures" that were almost identical to Azuki, which completely ignited the community's anger. Many well-known long-term holders, such as Azuki's major holder Christine, Alpies, and Kongereth, publicly chose to liquidate all their holdings of Azuki NFT series. Among them, Christine stated that this event made her lose trust in the team's ability and would transfer the management rights of the Chinese community.

From Christine's remarks, it is not difficult to see that the anger caused by Azuki's behavior subsequently led to a sharp decline in all series of Azuki, making people lament that the last strong blue-chip project in the bear market NFT track also came to an end.

Looking back at Azuki's development history over the past two years, its exquisite art style and lofty vision have been the main theme of NFT projects, but overconsumption of the community is the reason for its criticism. So, as Azuki approaches its two-year anniversary, can it win people's hearts by issuing coins?

Can Azuki's initial vision be achieved through issuing coins

Previously, many well-known NFT projects have seen issuing coins as the final destination of their development path. However, after issuing coins, the correlation between tokens and NFTs, as well as the role of tokens in subsequent project launches, seems minimal. It has inevitably been criticized as the "pension fund" pre-stored by NFT projects for the team.

Looking back at the situations of the two well-known NFT projects issuing coins, the token prices did indeed show impressive gains in the early stages of issuance. Taking the example of BAYC's token APE, after its listing on Binance, the APE price soared from 1 USDT to a high of 28 USDT, an increase of 2800%. However, the metaverse project launched by BAYC faced a situation of much ado about nothing, especially the early release of NFT holders' tokens, which emptied the value of their NFTs, and the subsequent value is worrying.

Although MEMEland adopted a bundled token release method, the subsequent application scenarios are still a mystery. Although the project team stated that they would use SocialFi products as the foundation to enhance the token's application scenarios, the possibility of eventual realization is still unknown.

So, can Azuki's issuance of coins achieve its vision? This depends on whether the project team can make a fresh start, formulate a coin issuance strategy that considers the community, and plan for subsequent development, and whether they can integrate tokens with NFTs and subsequent projects to truly embark on a unique path of metaverse development.

Mr. Blockchain posted on the X platform, suggesting that Azuki may adopt a dual-token economic model, with the ANIME token being just a utility token, and a governance token will be introduced later. This statement can only wait for subsequent verification, but personally, I believe that Azuki is highly likely to issue tokens on its two-year anniversary, which is more suitable to launch the ANIME token in conjunction with the two-year anniversary news.

Based on the previous situations of NFT projects issuing coins, investors can try to hold related series of NFTs to qualify for airdrops or purchase qualifications, which still have certain investment value in the early stage. However, the later stage depends on the overall situation of the project team, and as for the strength of the Azuki project team, it is up to everyone to judge.

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