Recently, the NFT world has been talking about Azuki Elemental NFTs, another collection of Azuki creators, but the community is very angry. In fact, when we look at the last 2 days after the sale, we saw a very serious decrease in Azuki's base price from 15 ETH to 9 ETH.
So What Is Azuki and Why Is It Important?
Launched on January 12, 2022, the Azuki NFTs of 10,000 unique, hand-drawn samurai and skateboarders quickly turned into a blue chip project. Owners of Azuki NFT become a member of the "The Garden" community and gain access to exclusive NFT discounts, streetwear collaborations, live events and more.
Azuki NFTs quickly became one of the most popular NFT projects of 2022, and we have seen an Azuki NFT reach a base price of 30 ETH.
Azuki Elemental
"Azuki Elementals" was first introduced last week at the "Follow the Rabbit" event in Las Vegas, held exclusively for Azuki owners. Some of the 20,000 NFTs based on the four Azuki elements earth, fire, lightning and water have been airdropped to NFT holders.
The remaining NFTs are available for purchase from 9:00 am PST on Tuesday. Owners of Azuki NFT were given a 10-minute pre-sale mint, while owners of another project, BEANZ, were entitled to a mint approximately 10 minutes later. At 9:20, a public sale would begin.
To participate in the pre-sale, Azuki and BEANZ holders were required to deposit 2 ETH. The entire collection was sold out within 15 minutes and no public sale was required. The team raised $38 million worth of Ethereum after the sale.
Many buyers expressed that they could not get Elemental NFT even though they have Azuki or BEANZ NFT. While some attributed this to the technical problems experienced during the mint process, others complained about the shortness of the mint period.
When we look at the 2 collections, we see that although new traits have been added to the characters, visually, they are very similar to Azuki's. After this bad mint and reveal process, we saw the Azuki Elementals floor price go down to 1.45 ETH.
Today, the following statement came from the Azuki official Twitter account.
“Azuki,
Opening the door to the garden is both challenging and exciting.
This time we missed the mark.
We hear you - mint process was rushed, PFPs are similar to Azuki.
Our goal was to grow the Garden, add new members to the community and most importantly expand the Azuki universe and bring more people into our ecosystem.
We chose to rely on the idea of Elementals when creating the collection. Each Elemental is bound to a field - Water, Fire, Lightning, Earth. However, the resulting product was largely similar to the main collection. And it was highly criticized by the community.
Azuki is the collection that makes us who we are and will always have a big stake in all future awards, with their owners first priority.
We know we lost a piece of your trust today, but nothing motivates us more to make things right.”
After all these explanations, will the community continue to trust Azuki and stand behind the project? We will see together.
