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Blue Chip NFTs 101 – Azuki, A New Kind Of Brand For The Future… And A Scandal

The idea behind Azuki is to mix NFT culture with anime-style drawings, with a global community working together behind the scenes. Which is phenomenal. Azuki defines itself as a “decentralized brand for the metaverse.” This brand’s main product is a collection of 10K anime-style avatars in NFT form. The collection is also called Azuki and at inception was one of the NFT space’s biggest success stories… 

… until admissions and revelations by one of the project’s creators cast a shadow on Azuki as a whole. 

Let’s review the project’s history, its characteristics, and the revelations that changed it all.

Azuki’s Origin Story

The project exists since January 12th, 2022. The team behind Azuki is Chiru Labs, their slogan is “Born in Los Angeles. Building for the metaverse.” Most of the members use pseudonyms and keep their identities private. A few use their real name, like Azuki’s co-creator and illustrator Arnold Tsang from Toronto, Canada. He’s well-know for his participation in “Overwatch,” which Wikipedia describes as “a 2016 team-based multiplayer first-person shooter game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment.”

The community behind it is a key part of the project. On Azuki’s website, they use slogans like “A new kind of brand that we build together” and “A brand for the metaverse. By the community.” Ownership of one of the 10K Azuki NFTs gives the user access to The Garden. A virtual place Azuki promises “starts with exclusive streetwear collabs, NFT drops, live events, and much more that will be revealed over time.”

Azuki is a digital brand. A “decentralized brand of the future.”

At first, it seemed like the NFT collection was going to propel them to instant classic status. The initial success made their name recognizable and sent the collection’s floor price to double digits. At one point, it reached a maximum of 22 ETH. Nowadays, the floor price at Opensea is 7.4 ETH, what happened? Whatever the reason, the Azuki collection gets around. It has moved a total volume of 260.2K ETH in transactions so far.

We Need A Little… Controversy

The turning point for Azuki was a Twitter Space, of all things. On May 10th, crypto influencer Andrew Wang interviewed  Zagabond, one of Azuki’s founders, who just like that revealed that he was part of a few NFT projects that didn’t end well. It almost sounded like they were a rug pull, and people freaked out accordingly. The collection’s floor price started falling and it hasn’t recovered yet. 

It was a mystery at first, but according to Cryptoslate, the projects Zagabond was involved with were:

  • CryptoPhunks, the original CryptoPunk copycat collection. The first collection to receive a DMCA takedown from Larva Labs. Because of that, the CryptoPhunks were delisted from OpenSea and Zagabond gave the project to all the holders in July, 2021.
  • Tendies, a project that failed to capture the NFT culture’s imagination and shut down in the middle of the minting process. 
  • CryptoZunks, a collection that defines itself as “the first Punks to be generated on-chain with randomized attributes. Each Zunk is guaranteed to be unique from any Punk.” Apparently, it failed because of Ethereum’s expensive gas fees.

According to Cryptoslate, “Like the first two projects, this failed one was also a lesson. Zagabond said these three projects taught him that “blindly following the NFT meta doesn’t get you far.” He claims that all the lessons from these projects are now being applied to make Azuki a success.” None of that helped and the collection’s floor price went downhill. 

The question here is, were these projects rug pulls or simple failures without bad intentions? 

ETH price chart for 09/08/2022 on Bitfinex | Source: ETH/USD on TradingView.com
Azuki, Built For The Metaverse

The definition of metaverse in Azuki’s site is controversial, to say the least.

“The metaverse today is where we currently spend most of our time: Discord + Twitter. How do we amplify this experience for Azuki members? How do we distribute the brand to places that have the most attention today? More importantly, where will the metaverse be one year+ from now?”

Is simple social media part of the metaverse? How does Azuki not know where the metaverse will be one year from now? Other blue-chip NFT collections are already building their version, laying their chips on the table. Is Azuki too late? Or are Chiru Labs just quietly developing? According to the company, they’re exploring the possibility of developing a game. “Few teams have the experience and background to build a genuinely great game with mass market appeal and scalability. Though the core team has the experience, it’s a huge endeavor nonetheless.”

The Azuki collection is down, but not out. The team seems to have shaken the stink that Zagabond’s revelations brought, but did so in the middle of a bear market in which the whole NFT market is down. Azuki stopped the bleeding. The question is, can they reclaim and even surpass past glories?

Featured Image: Azuki banner from their site | Charts by TradingView

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Blue Chip NFTs 101 – What Is The Proof Collective And Who’s Behind It?

The mysterious organization known as The Proof Collective defines itself as “a private members only collective of 1,000 dedicated NFT collectors and artists.” To join the Proof Collective someone would have to, you guessed it, own their NFT. So, in theory, anybody can be a part of it. In practice, though, the floor price for one of their passes is around 88 ETH at the time of writing. The size of the investment keeps the undesirables away.

The Proof Collective is all about NFTs. Because it’s the law, they run a private Discord in which you can probably receive the biggest alpha available. The organization also provides NFT info via its social media, produces a podcast in which they interview the biggest names in the NFT world, and, reportedly, owns a huge NFT collection.  At least its members do.

According to the website, those members own 153K NFTs, including 148 CryptoPunks and 817 Bored Apes. Who are those members?  We wouldn’t know for sure. Its founders are Kevin Rose, of Diggs fame, and illustrator Justin Mezzell. And it has been widely reported that the Proof Collective gave free memberships to digital artist Bleeple and motivational speaker and NFT millionaire Gary Vee. 

Enter The Influencers

In the following video, one of the Proof Collective founding members, Internet legend and Diggs co-founder Kevin Rose, says. “This is the very beginning of what’s going to be a multi-decade journey to build a new media company.” 

He also promises that Proof will combat FUD that comes with success by constantly shipping product. Moonbirds holders can expect benefits, airdrops, and physical objects related to the nascent brand.

What Is The Proof Collective?

The Proof Collective NFTs’ main benefit is the world’s most valuable currency: information. Besides a social club of sorts, the organization believes in “group bottoms-up-driven research.” Plus, some members are early NFT adopters that own all of the projects you hear about on social media and are actively looking for the next one. If you play your cards right and the gods smile in your direction, that  Proof Collective NFT might pay for itself in a few months.

The organization takes things one step further, though. As “a new media company,” The Proof Collective produces and releases its own NFT masterpieces. Their first product where the Grails, which mint was solely for the members of the organization and had the slogan, “20 artists. 20 unique pieces of art. Artist names revealed after the mint.” So far, they’ve unveiled art by Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, Mike Shinoda, Larva Labs, Rachel Ryle, and Gary Vaynerchuk among others.

The Proof Collective’s second product was the incredibly successful Moonbirds, who conquered the world on a bearish market. “There are a total of 10K Moonbirds, they were issued under the ERC-721 standard on the Ethereum blockchain. The mint price for each one was a whopping 2.5 ETH. That means that, at current prices, the Proof Collective made over $70M on that first day,” our report said.

At the moment, the floor price for the Proof Collective NFT is 88 ETH, which at today’s exchange rate is more than $200K. And the prices of the listed for sale ones go up to a whopping 700 ETH. Currently, these NFT tickets sit at #17 in Cryptoslam’s “NFT Collection Rankings by Sales Volume” list. The project has sold more than $800K in the last 24 hours and more than $52M since the Proof Collective’s creation. 

BTC price chart for 05/10/2022 on Gemini | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com
We Need A Little Controversy

Look, they don’t have any proof (no pun intended), but NFTethics suggests there’s something shady going on. “Some mentioned that we should check the purchases of proof collective, as many wallets only contains the proof collection and the floor is now 88 ETH. Wash trading is so common (…) these days that it’s not even noteworthy anymore.”

3/ Also nepotism is completely standard in the NFT space, so the fact that GaryVee (Gennady), his brother AJ, Beeple and some old friends received the Proof collective for free is standard. We saw quite a lot of other "old" friends that received the proof collective for free/$3. pic.twitter.com/o20NOgfIM4

— NFT Ethics (@NFTethics) April 15, 2022

Wash Trading is the process of buying and selling an asset in order to increase its perceived price. “In some situations, wash trades are executed by a trader and a broker who are colluding with each other, and other times wash trades are executed by investors acting as both the buyer and the seller of the security,” according to Investopedia.

Could the Proof Collective have done that? Maybe. But there’s no evidence, all of this is mere speculation.

In Conclusion

The Proof Collective entered the NFT space with a bang. The space has never seen an ascension this fast and a track record this clean. So far, they’ve done everything right. Does that guarantee future success? No, it doesn’t. But it certainly is impressive.

Check the previous edition of the Blue Chips NFT 101 series, Solana’s “DeGods.”

Featured Image: Proof Collective NFT, promotional image from their site | Charts by TradingView