Azuki struggles to maintain its status in the NFT market following a blog post made by Zagabond, Azuki’s founder. The NFT community was outraged, resulting in a sudden floor price drop of 45%.
Twitter has already declared Azuk dead seeing the drastic decline in the collection’s floor price in the marketplace.
Azuki, the world-renowned Japanese-comic-inspired NFT collection that once rivaled BAYC and World of Women on the Ethereum blockchain tumbles down after the bold statement made by the founder, Zagabond.
What did Zagabond’s blog post say?
Zagabond is the pseudonym of Azuki’s founder made a blog post on May 9, 2022, in an attempt to glorify the achievements and manifesto of Azuki as a leading NFT project in the web3 world. There were also three projects listed in the blog post:
- CryptoPhunnks
- Tendies
- CryptoZunks
In the post, Zagabond said that the CryptoPhunks was “born out of love for NBA Top Shot” as a “parody project.” For the second project, he “wound down” Tendies NFTs because it only minted 15% and didn’t give much profit as a meme collection. For the third project, CryptoZunks, he described that the project had some “limitations” due to Ethereum gas cost which killed the “product experience.”
After the post, a famous crypto Twitter influencer, ZachXBT, went on Twitter and called out Zagabond for his involvement in these projects as rugpulls.
A project is declared rugpull when the founder launches a project with a proper roadmap and then abandons it by running away with the investor’s money after the primary sale.
ZachXBT provocatively asked Zagabond if he rugged in those NFT projects. He tweeted:
Below the tweet, he also gave various screenshots as proof:
- https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1523804899456262152
- https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1523809835363577861
- https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1523818741141753859
Zagabond denies the allegations
Following the ZachXBT’s allegation, Zagabond immediately commented under his post claiming that the projects listed in the blog post were never rugpulls. He said: “Do I wish they were more successful? Of course. There was no product-market fit at the end of the day, but that doesn’t mean it’s a rug.”
He also released a proper apology on his Twitter on May 11, 2022:
Twitter calls Azuki ‘dead’
Despite Zagabond’s denial, the Azuki collection faced an extreme sell-out, decreasing the worth and floor price of the NFT from 19 ETH, $41,800 in USD, to about 10.9 ETH $24,000 in USD.
Seeing the declining prices in the market. A Twitter Space named ‘The Death of Azuki’ on Monday Evening declared “Azuki is dead.” The news spread like wildfire on the bird app. Within a few hours, it created a buzz among various buyers and investors questioning whether Azuki is really dead.
Prior to the post, the Azuki floor price hadn’t risen much. Due to various crashes and global crises, the overall market saw a decline in the NFT and crypto industry. According to NFT Price Floor, last month, the floor price dropped to 56% and 63% last week. With the Zagabond scandal, the floor price dropped even lower to 45% in 24 hours.
Final words
Although there is much anxiety surrounding the Zagabond scandal, Azuki is also seeing a surge in buy-outs from the collection. Within 24 hours, Azuki has sold 300 NFTs in the secondary market.
Compared to the Twitter community’s declaration that Azuki is dead, the marketplace performance shows that Azuki might have a hope of recovering from the sudden floor price drop.
If Zagabond manages to gain the trust of Twitter and the rest of the community, then the Azuki NFT collection won’t have to suffer from the loss. A statement might not be enough to convince the NFT community.
Until then, Azuki might experience even more price drops in the coming days.
