Holder Faith Collapses after “Double Kill” of Funds and Trust; Azuki Official Latest Response Not Accepted by Community

Holder Faith Collapses: Funds and Trust Double Kill; Azuki Response Rejected by Community

Author: Nancy, BlockingNews

From overcoming the crisis in its entrepreneurial history due to the founder’s Rug project and becoming a leader in the bear market with its new work being completely bought out by Holder in more than ten minutes, the strong community consensus is the key reason why Azuki stands at the forefront in the bear market. However, Azuki’s diamond hands may not have expected that the birth of the new series Azuki Elementals did not bring the expected feast, but instead brought a “double kill” of funds and faith.

Is the faith of Azuki holders still there? How can Azuki regain community trust? Can the small picture narrative still continue? BlockingNews interviewed many Azuki holders. Some of them avoided talking about it due to their interests, some waited for the bullet to fly for a while, and some revealed their true thoughts. At the same time, even though Azuki officials held an AMA to share the latest response, the community still did not buy it.

Azuki announces multiple remedial measures and future plans

In the face of the community’s accusations, the Azuki official tweeted an explanation that the team has been trying to use the original Azuki column as the operating core of its universe, but this has not been clearly conveyed to the community. Based on Azuki’s status, Azuki holders will always have the highest priority and excess distribution in future rewards, airdrops, and experiences.

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At the same time, Azuki’s founder ZAGABOND.ETH and two other co-founders steamboy and location tba held an AMA activity in Discord at 9:00 on June 30th. In the internal meeting, Azuki stated that the core focus of Azuki is not only to provide products, but also to provide experiences. At the same time, the team emphasized the importance of the OG series many times, and stated that they have first-level access rights to Azuki, which will be the center of Azuki’s universe and future plans, followed by Elementals and Beanz, among which Elementals is an external Web3 community. One way to access the “garden” on the second level, the core goal is to establish an attractive large-scale IP, so there are characters of children and animals. In addition, the virtual city of Hilumia is only a small part of Azuki legend.

Regarding the casting issue of Elementals this time, Azuki stated that it was inspired by NBA Top Shot and incorporated AI/social media elements, aiming to provide a social experience of live display for everyone, bringing immersion, but they admit that they did not do it at this point. At the same time, the team’s original intention in designing airdrops was to allow anyone to have the opportunity to obtain rare NFTs, but they messed up in assigning appropriate weights to ranks, which made their mechanisms too complicated.

In addition, according to multiple community members, Azuki proposed several remedial measures and future plans at this meeting, such as initiating a vote on updating Elementals’ art (especially backgrounds) in the community, including modifying Elementals’ original solid color background to a new relief background to make it more recognizable; and launching the “Collector System” later, which will give rights influenced by various factors such as holders’ series, NFT rarity, holding time, and badges, and holders’ selling behavior will affect the points they earn (even if they buy back). Azuki believes that IP/Web3 technology can subvert the animation industry, and they are cooperating with excellent animators to establish animation, which is a different kind of animation that will have interactive experiences, such as using NPC interactions to forge tokens or collectibles. The entire production process will be fully self-funded. The team and holders will have complete control of the animation and benefit from it, and the revenue will flow back to the Azuki project.

At the same time, Green bean will be used in the animation, but it is not tradable, and only OG Azuki holders will receive it; the Beanz series will also have its own roadmap, and the team will explore community-related content and also make some short animations. In addition, Zagabond also revealed that they are exploring ways to tokenize Azuki culture.

In addition, when holders asked Azuki how they would reshape community trust, ZAGABOND.ETH did not respond positively, but said, “I am excited, the whole team is excited, we are all excited, and you should be too.”

However, many holders do not buy the latest response from Azuki, such as KOL@JamesX, who said, “It is clear that the team itself has no new ideas for the points system or the tokens that everyone once expected. All the logic mentioned is played badly by other projects and is more like pure pie in the sky.”

Azuki holder @Alpies said, “The animation share is very ridiculous. Can you make money by doing animation now? It depends on peripheral sales, and the target audience is still Holder. Isn’t changing the picture done by the local dog project party? Haven’t considered it for more than half a year, now I want to change the picture. For the points system, it is also different from what Zagabond (founder) said before that they will not do a Stake system.”

Deep Reasons Behind Community Displeasure as Long-Term Holders Sell Off

Despite Azuki’s official statement that the initial goal of Elementals was to achieve community user growth, its actions have gone against its original intentions. The homogeneity and roughness of the content, technical errors, and the suspicion that revenue of 2,000 ETH was transferred to exchanges for shipment have all caused Azuki to lose the support of the community.

According to NFTGO data, during the release of the Elemental series, the number of NFTs held for over a year decreased by approximately 550, a drop of about 12.2%. According to Nansen data, a total of 132 long-term Azuki holders who held for more than a year sold their NFTs, and the number of long-term holders selling NFTs increased by 817%. In addition, 89 long-term holders have sold Beanz NFTs, and the number of long-term holders selling Beanz NFTs has increased by 155%.

Source: Nansen

For example, Azuki’s major holders @Christine郡主, @Alpies, and @Konger.eth publicly announced that they would liquidate their entire collection of Azuki NFTs. Christine not only expressed her loss of trust in the team, even though she had experienced the ups and downs of Azuki, but also transferred the management of the Chinese community as the founder of the Chinese community. Alpies said, “The graphics of the first generation Azuki are still unsurpassable today, with advanced colors and strong design sense. However, this time the new graphics is a devastating blow to the OG loyal users, with bad color matching, unclean graphics, many direct models and Traits from the first generation, and even rare badges on the collector’s page can be obtained by purchasing the second generation, selling completely non-matching products can be called naked fraud, which is impossible for users who have supported Azuki with real money to accept. Looking back, this Vegas activity was a trap, raising consensus through the conference, raising expectations through the exquisite promotional video, causing FOMO with a 10-minute minting window, delivering products that had nothing to do with the delivery and promotional video, and focusing on not giving users time to think, smoothly collecting 20,000 ETH. This kind of fractured narrative rhythm, including the extremely poor delivery of the second generation, makes me wonder if there are internal problems within the team.”

“The community has always been Azuki’s most powerful weapon. Even though there have been many FUDs before, these community members have been a solid force to actively maintain, so now these members are all iron fans who have survived many tests, but this time they have really hurt everyone’s wallets. Moreover, many community members participated in the minting of multiple Elementals, with dozens even having several. Azuki’s behavior has had a significant impact on community morale, and once faith begins to collapse, it will have a significant impact on the entire community.” Allen Ding, founder of Ebunker and holder, told BlockingNews.

As a loyal user who got into Azuki for its art style and production level, Allen Ding believes that the community’s dissatisfaction with Elementals and the Azuki team is not unfounded, with several main reasons: (1) From the Las Vegas conference to the rumors of coin issuance, and then to the animation, the market’s expectations were too high, and there was a huge gap after the good news was released. It can be said that Azuki’s latest animation can be called the most expensive animation, worth 38 million US dollars; (2) Elementals and Azuki are very similar, which harms the interests of holders. Elementals disrupts Azuki’s original rarity system, which is a kind of harm to Azuki OG holders, especially rare species holders. After all, before this, each rarity level element of Azuki had a clear market price range, such as gold weapons, elements, and spirits, but now Elementals and Azuki cannot be distinguished, and many attributes of the new series are still quite dazzling, which makes Azuki’s original rare attributes less rare, and Elementals prices are even cheaper. In this case, it is equivalent to Azuki’s inflation, increasing the total amount from 10k to 30k; (3) Quality. The community is not very satisfied with the painting details and style of Elementals, and the general evaluation is not as good as Azuki, such as shadow processing, and Traits (features and attributes) using Azuki’s ready-made ones, and even two identical ones. In the eyes of many members, the new series’ art style is not as advanced as before, like changing a painter, or Azuki’s inventory, AI batch production, and so on.

In addition, Allen also believes that Azuki Elementals’ sales method has also caused significant damage to the community. This sale was sold out before the public auction, which reflects the strength of the community, but opening the chart below the casting price directly and accurately harmed all loyal community members who supported it but suffered serious losses.

However, Allen still has confidence in Azuki. “Compared with other NFT projects in the current market, I still think that Azuki is at T0 level. People make mistakes, let alone Zagabond and Azuki teams who are so young. It is normal for them to make some mistakes, so I am willing to continue giving them opportunities. But it is not appropriate for the team to rush to issue Green Bean, because in the short term, the community’s morale is relatively low, and the market environment is not active enough. Green Bean is unlikely to have a good price performance, and it will definitely divert a part of the funds in the market, causing Azuki and Elementals to further lose blood.”

For the already unconfident PFP NFT market, the failure of Azuki’s new work is another blow. However, in Allen Ding’s view, Web3 will be able to produce successful IPs, and the influence of this IP can spread to the Web2 world, most likely in the form of PFP. But this process is long, as attracting talented people into the industry takes time. A good project needs a favorable environment and timing, as well as talented people. Currently, most of the PFP projects in the market are sickle products with a clear reaping purpose, and lack soul and ingenuity.”

In summary, for NFT projects like Azuki, only by presenting a sincere business plan can they slowly regain the trust of the community on the brink of collapse.

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