The trading volumes of anime-inspired NFT avatar collection ‘Azuki’ jumped by more than 64% during the past 24 hours, after the project’s founder revealed his apparent habit of abandoning projects in the past.
Today, the Azuki avatar collection ranks as the second most traded NFT collection on the OpenSea marketplace with a trading volume of 16,418 ETH, or more than $38.2 million USD,
Despite this high trading volume, the floor price of Azuki NFTs have been travelling in the opposite direction, undergoing a significant slump. The average floor price of a single Azuki NFT currently sits at 9 ETH, or $21.2K, at the time of writing, while just a few days ago, the average price of an Azuki NFT was closer to 18 ETH, or nearly $45K, at the ETH price of $2,490 at the time.
Azuki Founder Reveals His Past
The panic sell of the anime-style Azuki NFT collection was catalyzed by the project’s pseudonymous founder, Zagabond, publishing a post which detailed how the NFT projects he had previously been involved with, ‘CryptoPhunks‘, ‘Tendies‘ and ‘CryptoZunks‘ came to an end after being abandoned by their founding teams.
•Bull or bear, Azuki is building towards the future of web3. We're in it for the long term.•Builders need to experiment for web3 to challenge web2.•Azuki is built on learnings from creating Phunks & other projects. This taught me to lead, not follow.https://t.co/Z2enFov8m9— ZAGABOND.ETH (@ZAGABOND) May 9, 2022
“Builders need to experiment and innovate for Web 3.0 to be able to challenge Web 2.0. Azuki is built on learnings from CryptoPhunks and other projects, which taught me to lead, not follow,” Vagabond wrote, adding that the team is building Azuki NFTs with long term goals in mind.
Zagabond did not comment as to why he had chosen this time to make such confessions, especially considering the harm they could cause to his own and Azuki’s reputation. However, rumors in the NFT space are circulating that the information could have been made public knowledge outside of his control in the coming days.
Community Reacted
The part of the NFT community went rough on Azuki’s founder, hinting at him as a serial creator of rug pulls, which are a common type of scam in the crypto and the NFT world. Typically they come as legit-looking projects, but as soon as their value increases, founders pull out all the allocated funds and abandon the project.
So does Web 3.0 = rugging three projects in less than a year ? https://t.co/CzoPiz1Z6G— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) May 9, 2022
In the meantime, others have accused the NFT community of hypocrisy, stating that they do not care about the reputations of a particular project or its founders as long as they can make money with it.
The person behind Azuki admitted today that he is the one behind many rug pulls from other projects and people don’t care because they made money with Azuki. Cherry picking what to be mad about once again. We’re surrounded by a bunch of losers in the NFT space.— Hustler (@0xHustler) May 9, 2022
As previously mentioned, multiple traders swiftly jumped onto the OpenSea marketplace in an attempt to capitalize on the declining floor price of the Azuki NFT collection.
Minted in January 2022, the anime-themed Azuki avatar collection has been one of the top traded collections on the biggest NFT marketplaces ever since.