Zagabond, the pseudonymous founder of Azuki NFT, has chronicled his turbulent past in building NFT projects, resulting in a whole host of community backlash that’s gone-on to effect the floor price of the illustrious collection.
The story was revealed via a personal blog post. Despite starting seemingly pure and authentic, it went on to discuss his fundamental involvement in Cryptophunks, Tendies and Cryptozunks – three projects which are famous for being abandoned by their original founding team.
•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
Zagabond then went on to credit much of Azuki’s success to learning from the other project’s failures – as CryptoPhunks taught him “the important magic behind storytelling”, Tendies taught him “the importance of original ideas rather than chasing a short-lived meta”, and Cryptozunks taught him the importance of “a strong sense of purpose beyond rare traits, and unique experiences with gas optimisations”.
In what we can only assume to be a ploy to gain respect through self-doxxing his own malignant failures, a heavy load of NFT Twitter outrage has been served up, with many believing that Zagabond’s story was going to be made public in the coming days anyway, by way of on-chain sleuthing.
As ever, notorious on-chain detective Zachbxt led the Twitter charge, claiming the blog post’s ‘TLDR’ translates to “I rug pulled three projects in the past year”. He also claimed the Tendies rug-pull was ‘very hard and very fast’, after having first-hand exposure to it through being a member of such community.
Other community members have also pointed at the ‘cherry picking’ culture of rug-pull-outrage – as they claim many, especially those who’ve made money from the Azuki collection, aren’t particularly fazed by Zagabond’s previous actions.
That being said, in wake of Zagabond’s rug-pull disclosure, the Azuki NFT floor dropped from 19 ETH (around $42,000) to as low as 10.9 ETH (around $24,000), before rebounding back to 16 ETH (around $38,000) at the time of writing.
