The Founder of Azuki NFT Admits to Dropping Past Projects

The Azuki non-fungible token (NFT) project's pseudonymous founder exposed his tumultuous past with abandoned projects on Monday night, sending NFT Twitter into a frenzy and the collection's floor price plummeting.

•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

The creator, who goes by the Twitter handle Zagabond, outlined his involvement with the projects Cryptophunks, Tendies, and Cryptozunks, all of which were abandoned by their original founding team, in a blog post.

did the azuki founder just basically admit to founding and abandoning 3 projects within a year?
— soby🔺🐻 ⛓ (@sobylife) May 9, 2022

Much of Azuki's success, according to Zagabond, was due to learning from the other project's mistakes.

"It's critical that the community encourages innovators to develop and experiment during these formative days," Zagabond said in the blog post. "Each experiment also has important takeaways."

The news sparked outrage among the NFT community, with many expecting the information will be made public via on-chain investigation in the coming days.

So does Web 3.0 = rugging three projects in less than a year ? https://t.co/CzoPiz1Z6G
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) May 9, 2022

The post has rekindled the controversy about NFT founder disclosure, which peaked in February when BuzzFeed disclosed the true identity of the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

On the secondary market OpenSea, the price of an Azuki plunged from 19 ETH (about $42,000) to 10.9 ETH (roughly $24,000), but has subsequently risen to 12 ETH (around $31,000) at the time of writing.

Since its launch in February, Azukis has sold over 200,000 ETH (about $526 million) in total, the sixth highest of any NFT project.

=====