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Azuki NFT Founder Admits to Abandoning Past Projects
The project’s floor price has dropped dramatically following the news.
By Eli Tan
Updated May 11, 2023, 6:55 p.m. Published May 10, 2022, 2:11 a.m.
The pseudonymous founder of the popular Azuki non-fungible token (NFT) project revealed his fraught history with abandoned projects Monday night, sending NFT Twitter into a frenzy and the collection’s floor price dropping.
•Bull or bear, Azuki is building towards the future of web3. We're in it for the long term.
— ZAGABOND.ETH (@ZAGABOND) May 9, 2022
•Builders need to experiment for web3 to challenge web2.
•Azuki is built on learnings from creating Phunks & other projects. This taught me to lead, not follow.https://t.co/Z2enFov8m9
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The founder, known as the Twitter user Zagabond, chronicled his NFT history in a blog post that detailed his involvement with the projects CryptoPhunks, Tendies and Cryptozunks, all of which were abandoned by their original founding team.
did the azuki founder just basically admit to founding and abandoning 3 projects within a year?
— soby is on arbitrum !finalform (@sobylife) May 9, 2022
Zagabond credited much of Azuki’s success to learning from the other project’s failures.
“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.”
The announcement was met with backlash from the broader NFT community, with many believing the information was going to be made public in the coming days by way of on-chain sleuthing.
So does Web 3.0 = rugging three projects in less than a year ? https://t.co/CzoPiz1Z6G
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) May 9, 2022
The post has reignited the conversation around NFT founder transparency, a debate which peaked in February after the real identities of the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club were revealed by BuzzFeed.
The price of an Azuki on the secondary marketplace OpenSea dropped from 19 ether (around $42,000) to as low as 10.9 ETH (around $24,000), but has since rebounded to 12 ETH (around $31,000) at the time of writing.
Azukis have done more than 200,000 ETH (around $526 million) in total sales volume since their release in February, the sixth most of any NFT project.
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