“Azuki is dead,” declared the host of a Twitter Space titled “The Death of Azuki” Monday evening.
Azuki non-fungible token founder revealed his history of abandoned projects Monday night, sending NFT Twitter into a frenzy and causing the collection’s price to plummet.
The founder, known as the Twitter user Zagabond, wrote his NFT history in a blog post that detailed his experience with the different projects such as Cryptophunks, Tendies and Cryptozunks, which all were abandoned by their original founding team.
Zagabond commented that Azuki’s success was due to learning from the other project’s failures.
“During these formative times, it’s important that the community encourages creators to innovate and experiment,” Zagabond said in the blog post. “Additionally, each experiment comes with key learnings.”
The announcement was met with criticism from the broader NFT community. Many trusted the information was going to be made public in the coming days.
A debate which peaked in February after the real identities of the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club were revealed by BuzzFeed, the post has reignited the conversation around NFT founder transparency.
On the secondary marketplace OpenSea, the price of an Azuki dropped from 19 ETH (around $42,000) to as low as 10.9 ETH (around $24,000). Some NFT enthusiasts took advantage of Azuki’s declining price. The collection saw a high spike in sales, with over 300 sold on secondary marketplaces in a single day. The price of Azukis has since rebounded to 12 ETH (around $31,000).
Since their release in February, Azukis have done more than 200,000 ETH (around $526 million) in total sales volume, the sixth most of any NFT project.
