What You Need to Know About Azuki - the Popular NFT Project

2022-02-28, 09:08

Summary

1. The most popular NFT project at the moment is Azuki, with sales of up to nearly $300 million in the past month, an increase of over 5 times yearly
2. Azuki is a typical "two-dimensional IP" NFT project. Its series of NFTs contains 10,000 anime-style avatars in total.
3. Azuki's two major leading innovations in the NFT industry surely contribute to its success.
4. The first top innovative token standard ERC721A was created by Chiru Labs. The standard allows users to mint multiple NFTs in a single transaction, thereby greatly reducing the required Gas Fee.
5. A completed Azuki sale includes three stages: Dutch auction, Mintlist, and public sale.
6. The novel sales model enables Azuki to provide users with multiple price ranges to choose from.

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Currently, the most popular NFT project is certainly Azuki, with sales of up to nearly $300 million in the past month, an increase of over 5 times yearly, showing potential to temporarily overwhelm established NFT projects such as Bored Ape and CryptoPunks. At present, Azuki's floor price on OpenSea has exceeded 13.9 ETH, and the number of its holders has reached 5,400. So, What is Azuki? Why did Azuki gain in popularity?

Source: cryptoslam.io

Launched on January 12th at 10 AM PT, the Azuki project was priced at $3,400 per NFT. The first batch of NFTs sold out within 3 minutes, reaching $29 million in sales. Azuki is a Japanese word that means "azuki" or "red bean". It belongs to a typical "two-dimensional IP" NFT project. Its series of NFTs contains 10,000 anime-style avatars in total.

Each Azuki series avatar contains at most 12 different elements. They are Type, Special, Clothing, Offhand, Hair, Headgear, Face, Neck, Eyes, Mouth, Ear, and Background.

On Azuki's official website, users can click on a character's page to view the attributes of each element. In addition, users can use these 12 elements to quickly index a series of characters as required.

Azuki NFT series has a relatively rare comic style. Compared with other avatar NFT projects on the market, the Azuki series of NFTs is beautifully produced with a unified style. Meanwhile, users can use the Azuki series of NFTs as community tickets to the many activities held by the community to create value for the community members.

Azuki's two major leading innovations in the NFT industry surely contribute to its success. The first top innovative token standard ERC721A was created by Chiru Labs. The standard allows users to mint multiple NFTs in a single transaction, thereby greatly reducing the required Gas Fee and shortening the minting period. The Gas Fee reduced by the ERC721A standard is related to the number of NFTs minted at one time, according to the official de_script_ion of ERC721A. That is to say, the Gas Fee consumed by a single minting will only rise slightly and linearly with the increase of the number of NFTs in a single minting. In addition to Azuki, other 27 NFT projects have also used ERC721A as their token standard.

Azuki's second innovation is the novel sales model. Azuki completed its sale in three stages: Dutch auction, Mintlist, and public sale. The Dutch auction is also called the price reduction auction model. Starting from 10:00 am on January 12, about 8,700 Azuki series NFTs would be sold at a price of 1 ETH, and the price would drop by 0.05 ETH every 20 minutes until it would eventually reach 0.15 ETH. The Mintlist is common to the sales in the current NFT field. In the previous NFT projects, the Mintlist members were simply selected randomly through social media activities. However, Azuki effectively screened the "scientists” groups who could not be real Mintlist members and ensured Mintlist members were real active users of the community by comprehensively checking users’ data including reposts, likes, and comments. Starting at 10:00 am on January 13th, Azuki's Mintlist phase allowed the members to complete NFT minting within 48 hours. The minting price was half of the lowest price in the Dutch auction phase. Finally, the public sale phase started at 10 am on January 15th. All remaining Azuki series NFTs would be sold at the lowest price in the Dutch auction stage. The novel sales model enables Azuki to provide users with multiple price ranges to choose from.

Chiru Labs, the team behind Azuki, is Another key to its success. Most of the team members have been exposed to NFTs from NBA TopShot. Members' backgrounds and social accounts can also be checked on the official website. One of the team members, Arnold Tsand, is a former character designer for the well-known game Overwatch. In addition to the revenue from Azuki's initial offering, Chiru Labs will charge 5% of the transaction value of each Azuki NFT transaction.

Image: Core members of the Azuki project

Azuki is committed to setting up the largest decentralized brand built and owned by the community in the Metaverse. In the future, the project also plans to expand Azuki's IP to animation, games, fashion peripherals, and other fields, as well as carry out lots of offline activities and brand cooperation. Azuki is expected to launch a series of clothing products under the IP by the end of February. Meanwhile, activities such as related physical collections, offline stores, and concerts are also underway.

Image: Azuki Project - MindMap

Moreover, Azuki announced on the official website on February 11 that it will fragment Azuki NFT #40 (Bobu) in the next few weeks. The NFT will be securely kept in a set of special smart contracts, and each participant in the fragmented projects will receive Bobu tokens under the ERC-1155 standard. Token holders can jointly govern the role of Bobu, as well as trade their Bobu tokens on OpenSea. By doing so, Azuki hopes to explore decentralized IP governance.

Author: Ashley. H, Gate.io Researcher；Translator: Cedar. W
This article represents only the views of the researcher and does not constitute any investment suggestions.
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