Azuki Founder’s Shady Past Causes Price Volatility

The founder of Azuki NFT admitted to abandoning previous NFT projects, leading to intense price fluctuation of Azuki on the OpenSea marketplace.

Founder Admits To Abandoning Projects

Known only by his Twitter pseudonym Zagabond, the founder of the Azuki NFT project has revealed a controversial part of his history with previous projects on Monday night. The crypto community, especially NFT Twitter, has responded vehemently to his statements, reflecting negatively on the value of the Azuki collection on OpenSea. In a detailed blog post, Zagabond lists the previous projects that he has worked on – CryptoPhunks, Tendies, and CryptoZunks, and elaborates why each of the projects had to be wrapped up. 

He writes, 

“From these projects, it was clear that blindly following the NFT meta doesn’t get you far…I learned to always aim for substance with a real narrative. Going forward, I would work on a vision that combines a team’s unique skill sets, to build something more meaningful.”

Trial By Error Or Rug Pulls?

To sum it up, the blog credits the success of Azuki to the failure of the previous projects and the lessons learned from it. However, instead of focusing on the “learning from failure” part of the story, Twitter chose to interpret it as the founder abandoning multiple projects, calling them all “rug pulls.”

The NFT community especially has been repeatedly burnt by the “rug pull” narrative. It refers to fraudulent projects where the creative team wins over investors and early buyers through wild promises, which they promptly abandon to abscond with the funds raised. Several Twitter accounts are claiming that the abandonment of the three previous projects by Zagabond is indicative of “rug pulls.” 

A Twitter user questioned, 

“So does Web 3.0 = rugging three projects in less than a year?”

Azuki Price Fluctuates

The controversy around the founder’s previous projects has inadvertently affected the price of these NFTs. Soon after their release in February 2022, the Azukis performed admirably, rapidly climbing up in sales, reaching the sixth highest position in total sale volume for an NFT project. Since then, these NFTs have generated over 200,000 ETH (around $526 million). However, with Twitter up in arms about the Zagabond’s comments, the price of an Azuki dropped from 19 ETH ($42,000) to a low of 10.9 ETH (around $24,000). It is interesting to note, that despite the price drop, transaction volume has shot up by 998% in the last 24 hours as savvy traders attempt to capitalize on the steep price swings.

The Azuki collection has found itself included in unfavorable narratives lately despite its popularity. For example, when North Korean hacker group Lazarus attacked DeFiance founder Arthur Cheong’s hot wallet, his Azuki NFTs comprised a major portion of the stolen assets. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.