Azuki is probably a name that is not unfamiliar to users in the NFT market. However, the road to success today is not really smooth and has many thorns. So what are the difficulties that Azuki encounters and what are the reasons for Azuki’s current success? Let’s find out with the Weakhand team in this article.
What is Azuki?
Overview of Azuki
Azuki is named after a type of red bean grown in Japan that was released on January 12, 2022. The collection includes 10,000 anime-inspired NFTs by Los Angeles-based artists.
Each avatar in the collection is the result of a random combination of distinct characteristics such as hairstyle, background, clothing and accessories. Immediately after launch, the project also showed immediate appeal when all NFTs in the collection were sold out within 3 minutes and generated revenue of about $29M USD.
What is Azuki?
Azuki is also the eighth most traded collection worldwide after just one month, competing with familiar names such as: Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) from Yuga Labs and CryptoPunks.
Who is the team behind Azuki?
Chiru Labs is a company behind Azuki comprised of people passionate about art and NFTs. They joined forces to build a famous brand in the virtual world. Some prominent members of the company include:
- Zagabond: Has experience working at large corporations such as: Google,… Zagabond is also a Defi programmer and has studied at a famous technology university.
- Arnold Tsang (Steamboy): Is a famous name in the Gaming field. He used to be the character art director at Overwatch – a team shooting game with more than 60 million players.
- Hoshiboy, 2pm.flow, Location tba: Are Y Combinator alumni.
Although most Team members are anonymous. However, their professional working attitude and level of commitment to the project have helped them receive great support from the community.
Azuki’s Ecosystem
Azuki Collection
Azuki is the first collection developed by Chiru Labs. Besides the unique PFP NFTs, Azuki has a long-term roadmap that will help attract the NFT community to the project. The roadmap includes immersive 3D experiences, unique Azuki-themed merchandise, exhibitions for Azuki holders, and even a new NFT collection called Beanz.
As of January 2023, Azuki has continued along his path, providing streetwear for members of The Garden, establishing Gallery Metaverse, and planning Meta-games in the community.
Azuki Beanz NFT – A lovely companion
Beanz is a collection of 19,944 NFTs launched in April 2022. Beanz is considered the beginning of a new era for Azuki. Every owner of the original Azuki NFT received a mystery box in their wallet – later revealed to be characters from the Beanz collection.
Beanz is described as a small creature growing from the soil in The Garden. While some Beanz wish to help their Azuki friends, others choose to adventure alone. Given Azuki’s previous success, it’s no wonder that Beanz has been a huge success and generated $52M USD in revenue in the two weeks since launch.
Bobu – The Bean Farmer
Bobu is an experiment by Azuki on the traditional way of building IP by providing administrative convenience to the owner from the beginning. Azuki#40 or Bobu is deposited into a Fragment.art Vault, which segments and creates ERC-1155s called Bobu Tokens. Bodu Token holders in the community can participate in the governance of Bobu – a key character in the Azuki universe. Besides voting on decisions related to Bobu, the Bobu Token can also be used to set an avatar on the social networking platform Twitter.
Hilumia: Azuki World NFT
Hilumia – Azuki NFT World
From the beginning, with the aim of being more than just an NFT collection, Azuki has continuously updated and improved its products with systematic future roadmaps. In addition to the benefits that users get when owning NFTs such as: Access to The Garden, physical items, … the project also aims to build a Metaverse world for its community.
On January 12, 2023, on the occasion of the first anniversary of its founding, Azuki officially introduced Hilumia – a Metaverse city built by the community. All owners of Azuki NFT and Beanz Official NFT can take their NFT on a long journey through 10 unique locations across Hilumia. Azuki also revealed that Hilumia will connect the digital world and the physical world through Physical Backed Tokens (PBT). PBT plays a key role in Azuki’s goal of merging the digital and physical sectors. For instance, those who own one of the Anime characters’ golden skateboards can scan its corresponding PBT to be honored as part of the ruins of Hilumia.
Hilumia boasts a toy store, video game center, gym and even a market exhibition called “Love Island”. Furthermore, Azuki’s meticulous attention to detail in music and sound effects also adds to the unique user experience in this virtual world.
Azuki’s Stumble
Despite achieving great success in the early days of its debut, turbulence has come to Azuki. In May 2022, one of Azuki’s Co Founders, Zagabon, published a post on his Blog sharing about participating in 3 failed NFT projects:
- CryptoPhunks – CryptoPunk’s original copycat collection. The first collection to receive a DMCA takedown request from Larva Labs. As a result, CryptoPhunks was delisted from OpenSea. Zagabond abandoned/transferred the project to all holders in July 2021.
- Tendies – a project stopped working mid-mint.
- CryptoZunks – a collection that defines itself as “the first Punks created on-chain with random attributes, each Zunk is guaranteed to be unique from any Punk. But it failed because of Ethereum’s expensive gas fees.
Zagabond also revealed in the Blog that these three projects taught him that “following the NFT meta blindly won’t get you far.” Zagabond claims that all the lessons from these projects are now being applied to make Azuki a success.
This post led to charges against Zagabond for withholding information and committing fraud. Even though Zagabond later apologized on Twitter, Azuki’s floor price continued to plummet from 19 ETH to just 10.9 ETH. However, ignoring the bad scenarios, Azuki is still committed to the roadmap with the community. Azuki introduced clothing to The Garden residents in the fall, created the Gallery Metaverse, and planned to develop a game for the community.
What’s Behind Azuki’s Success
Even though he had to go through a very difficult time in the past, Azuki still stood firm and grew even stronger than before. With so many PFP NFT collections existing in the NFT market, at first glance there isn’t much that makes Azuki stand out. However, until you actually stop to look at the project and see the amazing things they’ve put into every aspect of their brand. Here are some factors that may have helped Azuki stand out among the sea of other collectibles in the NFT market:
Quality and rarity of NFT art
When it comes to NFTs, you can judge a project by their artwork. Azuki’s anime-inspired designs are not only beautiful and created with clean lines, but also show the development strategy of the project.
The different characteristics of NFTs give them unique rarities that collectors can easily filter out. In addition, the skateboarding art style of the Azuki characters is also a reason why the project is in great demand when it comes to creating communication between like-minded individuals.
Niche market (Asia)
The launch comes at a time when the PFP segment is dominated by Bored Ape Yacht Clubs (BAYC) with most of its customer base in the European market. Instead of trying to compete with large collections, Azuki took smart steps by choosing the Asian market as a destination and focusing on the anime market. We saw another popular anime-themed project (0N1 Force) launch before Azuki (August 2021), but it later failed due to the project’s supposedly weak management team. Azuki not only filled this gap in the market but also took over it completely.
Talented team
A successful project is indispensable without a good and dedicated team. Although most of the members in Azuki are anonymous, their commitment is extremely high and the community can easily see through Azuki’s growth.
Community Connection
Azuki Community
Community is considered the soul of an NFT project and Azuki is no exception. Since its launch, the Azuki community has grown rapidly on media such as Twitter or Discord. Azuki also organizes events to meet and bring community members closer.
Azuki’s goal is for many community members to participate in the metaverse world he is developing. But with a floor price of a few dozen ETH, it goes without saying that NFTs are out of reach for many people. However, it would make more sense to continue increasing the quality and quantity of people involved in the project from the founders’ perspective to grow the brand.
In doing so, it is still important to maintain the exclusivity of the project to retain the value of the original collection. Just as Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) released the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) collection, Azuki also introduced a “side” collection with Beanz and Bobu.
In essence, each of the 50,000 pieces is a segmented version of Azuki #40 owned by the group (named Bobu). It is used to vote on decisions regarding the development of Bobu as part of the Azuki brand. Users who own the Bobu NFT have access to The Garden and several other media channels such as private Discord, etc. The purpose of doing so is to ensure that there are low barriers to entry for “fans”. admire” Azuki and increase the number of interactions with Azuki.
This special choice and form of the secondary collection maintains the exclusivity of the original collection while adding a new dimension to the Azuki brand in the form of owner-led character development head.
Utility of NFTs
The utility of an NFT is extremely important to retain old people and attract new people to join the project. Azuki NFT owners have access to The Garden, Azuki shirts through collaborations with streetwear brands, Azuki merchandise, NFT airdrop programs, etc. Each Azuki also serves as an identifier in the world. Metaverse Hilumia.
Technological innovation
On January 7, 2022, Azuki introduced ERC721A – an improved version of IERC721 with significant gas fee savings with the ability to mint multiple NFTs in a single transaction. Essentially, ERC721A allows users to mint multiple NFTs for essentially the same cost as minting one NFT. Azuki’s vision is to build a Metaverse brand together with the community so the dev team’s focus is on contract optimization and helping the community spend as little as possible on gas fees when minting.
New Era: Physical Backed Tokens by Azuki
Gold Shadeboard by Azuki
Announced in October 2022, Physical Backed Token (PBT) promises to blur the lines between digital and physical. The project has also provided a decentralized way to authenticate and track the entire ownership of physical items by users.
Azuki also closed the auction for eight skateboard NFTs that will be converted into physical gold skateboards. According to the project, Gold Shateboard is an artifact that demonstrates the utility of PBT and opens a new chapter for Azuki.
