Where is the market for Azuki and the collapse of Yuga Labs' NFT?

Author: Climber, Golden Finance

I am afraid that the Azuki project team did not expect that a game of misappropriating money with a profit of less than 40 million US dollars not only ensnared itself, but also plunged the entire NFT market into a quagmire.

In May of this year, the NFT market ushered in its darkest moment, and a large number of traders entered the market confidently to buy bottoms. However, things backfired. Starting from June 28th, under the mysterious operation of the Azuki project party, the release of the new series "Azuki Elementals" caused the belief of the entire Azuki community to collapse and the prices of the entire series plummeted. For details, please click on the previous article of Jinse Finance: "Golden Observation | Empathy Community, Defeating Community Azuki and becoming a Zagabond Learning Experiment?" "Not only that, but also a number of mainstream blue-chip NFT projects, including BAYC, have also experienced a general decline.

As the leading NFT project party, Yuga Labs has a rich ecosystem and leads the development trend and direction of the entire NFT circle. Especially since the low point of the NFT market in May, Yuga Labs has been working on the ecological development and construction of "Ape Universe". And after hiring Daniel Alegre, the former president of Activision Blizzard, as the CEO of the company, a new game "HV-MTL Forge" was launched. Seeing that the originally shaky NFT market has shown signs of stabilization, Azuki has brought a crisis of NFT belief.

**NFT is to some extent an "experimental art of rebellious behavior", which is the future that Web3 followers believe. **The encryption market has a cycle of ups and downs, but the rebuilding of community confidence requires the construction of the project side bit by bit.

NFT****The market presents an "end-time scene"

The short-sighted profit-making behavior of the Azuki project party has also caused itself to suffer backlash. From community members, investors, institutions to people outside the circle, they all feel sad and despise their actions.

AzukiDAO first initiated accountability for the Azuki team and its founder, Zagabond, and proposed and passed a proposal to hire a lawyer to help the community recover 20,000 ETH from Zagabond. At the same time, after the Azuki governance token contract was attacked due to vulnerabilities, it is planned to transfer all tokens to the DAO treasury, which fully reflects the community's loss of trust in the original original team.

After AzukiDAO passed the proposal to sue Azuki, Jeremy Cahen, the founder of Not Larva Labs, also stood up and said that he had criminal information on the fraudulent fraud of more than 100 million US dollars by Zagabond, the founder of Azuki, and was willing to testify in court.

After the release of the "Azuki Elementals" series, the price of the new product broke and the next generation fell off the cliff. The rise and fall of the price is a normal phenomenon of market fluctuations, but in addition to some long-term large Azuki holders who have liquidated their positions, HeySkylark, a software engineer of the Azuki team, has also begun to sell the Azuki NFTs he holds.

According to Blur market data, on July 2, the floor price of Azuki was temporarily at 6.45 ETH, a drop of 17.5% in 24 hours; the floor price of Azuki Elementals was temporarily reported at 0.97 ETH, a drop of 23.02% in 24 hours; the floor price of Beanz was temporarily reported at 0.3857 ETH, The 24-hour drop reached 15.82%.

For a while, the FUD sentiment spread to other NFT projects, and the blue-chip NFT projects led by BAYC were affected and forced to fall. In addition, TVL of multiple NFT lending agreements experienced a large decline within a day.

On the day when the Azuki series plummeted, the floor price of BAYC fell below 30 ETH, the floor price of MAYC fell below 5 ETH, and The Captainz temporarily fell to 5.35 ETH, with the largest drop of more than 18%. While BendDAOLendingTVL fell by 43.02% in a single day; ParaSpaceLendingTVL fell by 13.07% in a single day; BlurLendingTVL fell by 29.51% in a single day.

As of the publication of this article, the major mainstream NFTs have picked up, but from the rise and fall in the past 7 days, it can still be seen that the NFT market has been miserable in the past few days. In addition, as a rebound after the deep drop, it is still unknown whether the subsequent NFT market can stabilize and rise. Therefore, the scars left by the azuki project party on the entire NFT market this time do not know when it will heal.

AzukiRetreat, Yagu LabsXiangshi

Although the Azuki NFT project was launched a year later than Yagu Labs, its founders and their team had three NFT project experience before that. And with Yagu Labs, the leading NFT brother, leading the way, Azuki can follow up and imitate the project operation without falling behind.

But as long as you follow the timeline and compare the development paths of the two projects vertically, you can find that **Yagu Labs not only has PFP NFT series such as BAYC, MAYC, and CryptoPunks, but also has "ape" image NFTs such as APECoin, Otherside, and games as the center. Brand ecology. At the same time, in the "Ape Universe" of Yagu Labs, each NFT category has landing projects. **

**In contrast, the Azuki team is a model of taking money and doing nothing. **In October last year, foreign media reported that Chiru Labs, the development team of Azuki NFT series, was close to completing the A-round financing of US$30 million, and the market valuation was rumored to reach US$1 billion. But from the beginning of last year to the end of June this year, nearly a year and a half, only after Azuki and Azuki Beanz, the imitation Azuki Elementals series was launched. There are few bright spots in the ecological progress of other projects.

**Azuki's initial success was largely due to marketing plus celebrity. **For example, NBA stars Andre Iguodala, JJ Lin, Jay Chou and other celebrities have used their own popularity to greatly drive Azuki out of the circle, and the Azuki team also recognizes this, and frequently cooperates with well-known IP parties to promote Own.

For example, it has reached a partnership with the global IP platform IPX, the Chinese community has settled in Xiaohongshu, cooperated with Bilibili International to explore animation and media content, joined hands with the Korean hip-hop band Epik High, and so on. In short, Azuki went out to find traffic partners to help him promote himself.

But ironically, Azuki's metaverse plan and Web3 vision have been established a lot, but few of them have actually been implemented. Only Garden is used as a gathering place for community members to sublimate Azuki's characteristic decentralized brand.

In January of this year, Azuki officially announced the launch of the virtual urban space "Hilumia", but after entering it, it was discovered that the multiple in-depth scenes that can be further experienced are completely a pair of PPT dynamic pictures. In addition, Azuki’s game project partner 9 Lives Arcade can find very little information, and the information from the community shows that the project aims to connect fans of traditional classic games with modern game lovers. The goal.

In stark contrast, Yagu Labs has the idea of dominating the virtual universe. At the beginning of the project, the goal was to build a media empire centered entirely on NFT. In the follow-up project promotion, people inside and outside the circle have witnessed the gradual improvement of the project ecology.

In addition to acquiring CryptoPunks and Meebits, establishing ApeCoin DAO, and launching the new Metaverse project Otherside, Yagu Labs is also actively expanding the static PFP NFT form to the game field, thereby increasing the scope of community members and expanding the "Ape Universe" ecology.

Regarding this new NFT development plan, Daniel Alegre, the new CEO of **Yuga Labs, said that NFT still has a bright future because it is the key to the world of games, events and e-commerce. **

As early as 2021, Yuga Labs is already making preparations for crossing into the gaming field. And just in January of the following year, Yuga Labs officially launched the mobile game "Apes vs. Mutants". Not only the NFT holders of the Boring Ape series can get extra rewards, but ordinary users can also play as tourists.

In addition, Yuga Labs also launched Dookey Dash, and cooperated with Animoca Brands to create Otherside's 2D strategy game Legends of the Mara (LOTM), and recently launched the casual game HV-MTL Forge. It is not difficult to see that these are metaverse games that have already landed and can be launched with a high probability.

In fact, the attitude of the project side can be seen from the employment of Yuga Labs before. For example, it first hired Spencer Tucker, the former game president of mobile game studio Scopely, as the first chief game officer of Yuga Labs, and then chose the former president and COO of Activision Blizzard as the new CEO.

Only from the comparison of the above actions, we can see the gap between the two in the pursuit of the NFT vision. There may be gaps in the founding team, operating funds, technical level and other aspects between the two parties, but in terms of belief in their respective projects , Azuki also has extremely loyal community members.

The road ahead is long, with faith as a companion

**The whole series of Azuki projects collapsed. The biggest reason is the collapse of community belief caused by the project party’s pursuit of short-term profits. **The high value achieved since the advent of NFT is nothing more than a consensus. Once the consensus dissipates, these so-called unique little pictures are not much different from copy-pasted pictures.

NFT giant whale dingaling stated on its social platform that the Azuki team is trying its best to make up for the Elementals incident, and believes that the price of Azuki is likely to return in the future. In addition, Christian, a big Azuki owner and co-founder of NDV, said that although he has lost more than 1,000 ETH in his NFT portfolio in recent days, he would sell any Azuki.

In addition, while Azuki was being sold off, there were also big bargain hunters. For example, Huang Licheng actively rushed to raise funds and accumulated 84 Azuki in the past few days, becoming the second largest holder of Azuki.

At the same time, after experiencing the "apocalyptic scene" in the NFT market, as of the publication of this article, Azuki bottomed out and rebounded, and the floor price rose by 22.92% in 24 hours.

It can be seen that as long as investors' belief in NFT is still there, even if the project encounters a black swan event, it still has growth value. **

For the future of NFT, the most important thing is how to maintain the belief of the new team.

After the release of Azuki's new series, the founder of the NFT start-up team @ said that at the moment when the NFT market is entering a deep-cold bear market, the founders of the NFT project had difficulty "eating grass", but they had to "run" with all their strength. This originally originated from love, belief and pursuit of the Web3 world, but Azuki broke these romantic feelings.

However, he also mentioned that **Azuki's "disruption" is not the complete obliteration of trust in the entire NFT market, but may be the beginning of a "great purification of the NFT circle". **Players achieve a comprehensive upgrade of the NFT market by increasing their requirements for project parties.

In the end, he said that ** idealism will not die, and NFT will get better and better. **

It can be seen that despite the differences between the Azuki project party and the founder, institutions, large investors, and other project parties have not lost confidence in the NFT field, and are still looking forward to the bright future of NFT.

Conclusion

Recently, the entire NFT market has fallen in an all-round way, but it cannot be completely said that azuki caused this situation. The market, cycle, investor sentiment, etc. are all possible factors. And for a long time, the way forward for NFT itself has been under exploration. However, the misappropriation behavior of the Azuki project party has indeed dealt a heavy blow to the belief of everyone who loves NFT.

The idea of Web3 is to return the value created by Internet content to the hands of users, and decentralization should be the essence that builders always pursue. The success of an NFT project is of course inseparable from the credit of the founding team, but subsequent success is also inseparable from the participation and support of many community members. Therefore, it is very important for the project ownership to be controlled by the community. Only Builders who truly believe in NFT are more likely to stand the test of humanity.