Azuki Elementals NFT Drop Yields $38 Million in Just 15 Minutes

Even amid a dampened NFT market, one of the space’s most successful original brands—Azuki from Chiru Labs—just raised $38 million worth of Ethereum in 15 minutes with a sold-out drop.

Azuki held its Ethereum NFT drop for its new Elementals profile picture (PFP) collection this morning, with 10,000 of the NFTs put up for sale via a Dutch auction format starting at a price of 2 ETH ($3,800) apiece. Another 10,000 Elementals NFTs were already airdropped to existing Azuki NFT holders over the weekend.

Holders of Azuki NFTs and spinoff Beanz NFTs were each given an exclusive 10-minute window to purchase Elementals NFTs before the public sale this morning, and ultimately all 10,000 of those NFTs were sold during the broader presale window.

“There will be no public sale,” the official Azuki account tweeted with the sell-out news, about 15 minutes after the initial presale began.

Chiru Labs pulled in 20,000 ETH via the sale, or $38 million worth at the current price of Ethereum. The team is set to unveil the Elementals artwork and open up secondary trading shortly, which may trigger a flurry of NFT flips on marketplaces.

Azuki is one of the most successful NFT projects to date in terms of trading activity, with more than $1 billion worth of secondary trading volume since its early 2022 debut. Among original projects not derived from existing Web3 IP, Azuki was 2022’s most successful new project by that metric. The Beanz collection has also generated $276 million worth of trading to date.