Azuki has also fallen. Is the narrative of picture NFT over?

The "ice and fire" performance by Azuki has made the dull NFT market lively again.

In such a bear market, Azuki's new series "Azuki Elementals" sold out in less than 20 minutes at a price of 1 ETH. In less than 20 minutes, 20,000 ETH (about 37.406 million US dollars) were swept up, and more than 2 million US dollars were received every minute. After it was sold out, everyone from Twitter to WeChat group chats was "sighing", some said who said no one was interested in NFT, and some said it was really great that it was so easy to make money in a bear market...

More than 2 hours later, Azuki Elementals was released, and everyone shouted "WTF". It's not that the new series is too good, but that they are dumbfounded - is this an additional issue?

Azuki Elementals after opening the map

The more beautiful the expectations were before the picture was released, the more disappointed people were after the picture was released. Many NFT players brought out Azuki's promotional animation to mock and "whip the corpse".

Community teasing of Azuki Elementals

Previously, Azuki's derivative series Beanz made a surprise appearance at the end of a party in the form of "Check your wallet". With a successful case that was full of surprises, the Azuki community and the market are undoubtedly full of expectations for this Azuki Elementals. In particular, the Azuki official Twitter account also released a 1-minute short animation on June 24, which definitely whetted everyone's appetite for "One Bean a Year".

Various problems during the issuance process were also criticized by its holders: dissatisfaction with the short 10-minute window period for the whitelisted Mint, dissatisfaction with the failure of the Mint due to website overload, and high duplication of various features with the first generation of Azuki. Holders are also worried about the possible dilution of the value of the first generation caused by Azuki Elementals...

Affected by the opening of the chart, Azuki's floor price also fell from 12 ETH to below 10 ETH, and is currently around the 10 ETH mark, a drop of about 20%. Judging from the voices on social media, the turmoil Azuki is facing this time is no less than the negative news about its founder Zagabond's "Rug Pull Entrepreneurship".

How much faith is left in Azuki?

In addition to the fact that the mint time was only ten minutes, which caused the website traffic to overload and crash directly in a short period of time, and the similar disguised increase in the picture, the most criticized by the community was that after the sale, the project party directly transferred 20,000 ETH. The transfer of 20,000 ETH caused a lot of heated discussion. Many people couldn't believe that this was an operation made by a first-tier blue-chip NFT team. Disappointment and suspicion filled the community. However, regarding the claim that the team took away 20,000 ETH and ran away, there was also a point of view in the community that the team transferred it to a multi-money wallet for safety reasons.

On June 25, nftftc co-founder Sibel (@sibeleth) said on social media: "This is the end of NFT... With the 2 upcoming mints, Azuki and Ether, this bloody market will lose a total of 50 million US dollars. Although we are all playing the "hot potato" game, I don't think NFT will return for at least 6 months. I'm sorry for our losses. "

KOL 0x Sun (@0xSunNFT) said on Twitter that it is hard to believe that this is the quality of delivery of the Azuki team, and all the reluctance comes from misunderstanding. At present, the team has not made any announcement after the opening of the map, and I don’t know how they will respond. If this set of re-engraved first-generation maps is really all the contents of Elementals, and there is no follow-up work or support, then this release can be said to be a naked harvest.

Before the Azuki Elementals series was released, Christian 2022.mid (@Christianeth), a whale with thousands of Ethereum in Azuki and Yuga, believed that Yuga’s Ponzi logic was obviously not working, so from a narrative perspective, he was more looking forward to Azuki’s story.

In a previous interview with Christian by BlockBeats, Christian expressed his views on PFP's NFT model: "If a team has no new ideas, no innovation that can drive the community, or no new business model and development direction, the next cycle will be difficult. I even think that Azuki's narrative is more attractive than the monkey, which allows them to maintain the value of the project when market sentiment is low."

Christian, who owns more than 470 BEANZ and 40 Azuki, prepared 1,000 ETH for the sale of Azuki Elementals that night, hoping to do his best to improve the liquidity of the entire NFT market. When he woke up in the morning, Christian had 682 BEANZ and 410 elementals.

But even though many community members have completely lost faith in Azuki, Christian made the decision to "recharge his faith." He tweeted: "It is unwise to destroy a multi-billion project (and the most loyal community on the planet) for a profit of 38 million. I am willing to pay $40 million to buy the entire company."

The Titanic of Blue-Chip NFTs

Looking back at the performance over the past three months, the NFT market has been on a downward trend, regardless of whether it has a blue chip halo or not. The market value has dropped sharply by 23.64%, from 5.1 million ETH to 3.9 million ETH. Looking at the blue chip index, although there was a brief rebound between May 31 and June 5, it generally followed a downward trend - from 85,000 ETH to 75,000 ETH, a decrease of 12.22%.

Many blue-chip NFTs have not been able to escape the baptism of the bear market:

Moonbirds

Moonbirds is one of the NFTs that has soared the fastest in the bull market. Its price rose from 2.5 ETH at the time of release to 40 ETH in a few weeks. However, Moonbirds, known as the Moonbird, has not turned the community's expectations into consensus. Not only is it due to the scandal of its former COO, but also its decision to change NFT to CC 0 regardless of the community and the concept of soft staking that did not meet expectations are also the reasons for its further loss of power. The current floor price of Moonbirds has fallen to around 1.5 ETH.

Doodles

The joining of Pharrell Williams, now the creative director of LV menswear, failed to save Doodles, which was drifting away from the community. The co-founder of Noodles, who chose not to follow the crowd, hurt the Doodles community. The community had already accused the Doodles team of inaction and set a threshold for community communication (Discord). The decision to migrate to the Flow chain in early 2023 completely triggered the dissatisfaction of the Doodles community. After that, its floor price fell from 7 ETH to 1.5 ETH, far from the high of 22 ETH.

BAYC

Even the king of NFT, BAYC (BoredApeYachtClub), has not been able to withstand the pressure this year. Its floor price has fallen sharply, from 150 ETH at its peak to 40 ETH, and even to around 34 ETH. The decline in the past week has reached 14.92%. Despite the announcement of the launch of the new game HV-MTL Forge on June 29, this has not brought a significant rebound to BAYC's declining floor price. By observing the whales of BAYC, we can get a glimpse of the reasons for its sharp decline.

Franklin, who held more than 60 BAYCs at the peak, sold most of his BAYCs because of his numerous investment mistakes, causing panic in the community many times, and even ended up deleting his Twitter and quitting the Internet. Huang Licheng, the wild spokesperson for BAYC, also expressed his dissatisfaction with Yuga Labs, the parent company of BAYC, saying that there were certain problems with the structure of ApeCoin DAO, which was too centralized, making it impossible to realize the investment vision of DAO. After experiencing many "roller coaster" transactions on the NFT trading platform Blur, Huang Licheng finally chose to sell BAYC. He sold BAYC many times in June. So far, there is only one BAYC in his main account.

In comparison, Azuki and Beanz are undoubtedly "much stronger", even going against the market trend and successfully becoming the strongest blue chip projects. Azuki, whose floor price was more than 30 ETH at the peak of the bull market, even rose to 17 ETH a few days ago. Not only that, the community atmosphere of the Azuki community is also a model of strong activity and cohesion in the bear market, thanks to the strong community support and product appeal behind it. After the release of Elements, the community seems to have lost confidence in this "last blue chip".

Of course, there are still some dark horses in the NFT circle in 2023, such as Milady and Punk, which are "focused on doing nothing", which are extremely strong. With the step-by-step decline of BAYC, Punk has returned to the throne of the highest-priced blue-chip NFT, and Milady has even been "favored" by Elon Musk. Pudgy Penguins, the fat penguin, has taken a different approach. After completing a $9 million financing led by 1kx, it announced that it would break the circle by delivering its IP to the real world. The peripheral Pudgy Toys launched shortly afterwards sold 20,000 pieces within 48 hours of going online, and even won the Toy Insider 2023 Best Summer Toy Award.

Reflections on Image NFTs

Azuki's delivery result this time is really disappointing. After all, you got $37.4 million, but even the picture itself has some low-level errors. NFT players "picked up details" to find these low-level errors and made fun of them, which also reflects how angry and disappointed everyone is.

Making money is so easy, has Azuki forgotten that the reason for taking money from users is to do things? Putting aside the logic of hype, saying that they want to create an IP in a picture at the beginning is the same as an independent game launched on Kickstarter. Indeed, many people bought it just for Degen, but as a project owner, are you just setting up a "gambling game" to not only collect money from chips but also use royalties to drain users' water? From the first generation of Azuki to now, the sales income and royalties income are already enough. How much money has been spent on content creation that you still have to take money from users?

The value of the NFT "shell" has been squeezed to almost nothing. If Azuki happens a few more times, the distrust between the project owners and users may be completely worn out.

To put it bluntly, NFT is nothing more than a blockchain technology implementation. A picture is sold at such a high price because it uses blockchain technology to store and sell. There is a gambling element, but also a kind of support and trust in the vision you put forward by people who love NFT. The biggest pain point of small picture NFT is that it is essentially just "a picture at the beginning", and it has no more content, so we have to create content and explore attempts such as IP on top of the content.

Other cultures that have already run through business models early on all have high-quality content that can both stabilize the stock and attract incremental growth. For example, musicians can spend ten years honing their skills like the Universal Youth Hostel, and release albums one after another, because even in the gaps in content creation, people can still appreciate and consume previous works. What can small picture NFTs do? Do you expect everyone to drool over a picture every day and fantasize about their own metaverse clones? We can simply imagine that if Azuki is not an NFT, if you see these pictures in the offline cultural and creative market, will you spend even 100 yuan to consume them? After taking it home, how long will you be interested in it?

That’s why everyone realizes how difficult it is to build a community for small picture NFTs. After the novelty wears off, there’s really nothing to talk about except whether it went up today or down tomorrow. You can get so much money, and everyone hopes that you can make a breakthrough, but in fact, your breakthrough has not been delivered yet. Update the website, make a few clothes, and hold a few parties. More than a year has passed. Does this really match the funds you raised?

We have gone through a complete investment cycle, many projects have been falsified, and everyone understands the direction of the entire market. Looking back at the early days of BAYC's hot full commercial rights IP licensing, the community and artists integrated BAYC into various creative works: beer, neon signs, merchandise, coffee, bars, hamburgers, stories, comics... BAYC has derived many artistic derivatives. But I don't know when BAYC changed, and its cultural output is gradually lost.

In this context, Christian 2022.mid (@Christianeth), co-founder of NextGen Fund and WeirdoGhostGang, believes that in the next cycle, new blue-chip NFT projects must have two characteristics: first, they must be able to attract more outsiders to join the community through cultural output; second, they must move from virtual to real, with real products and sustainable business models, so that everyone can see the value of Web3 and what it does. Christian said this is also the reason why he chose to invest in The Weirdo Ghost Gang project.

First create content, then come up with products, and then run a sustainable business model. This is a very difficult process, but this is the only way for NFT to accumulate real value. It is already 2023. If the "shell" of NFT is still only used to build a carnival gamble, how can we expect the future of NFT?

It’s time to go back and throw away this “shell”. What we did is not that great. We just used blockchain technology to store a picture and are struggling to explore new possibilities. If you think that you can make money quickly and in large quantities by doing NFT projects, or just hype and make money that has nothing to do with me, from the project side to the user, you can only revolve around the old narrative in this circle, and it will be really difficult to move forward.

Projects with money can create more interesting content, and projects without money don’t need to cut any money at all. Is it impossible to grow from a "small online store" selling peripherals? The road is too difficult and we don’t want to go. The narrative of picture NFT has not come to an end at all, but we need to tell ourselves more honestly that this is a difficult road in itself. Go down to earth, and you will find that users are always by your side.