AZUKI is slowly losing its popularity after the emergence of the latest news from its fictional founder Zagabond. According to reports, Zagabond revealed he was directly linked with up to three failed projects. The information sparked fear among the NFT holders, and many feared it might be the project’s downfall.
Through his post yesterday, Zagabond sent the NFT space into a standstill on Monday night in a series of revelations on his past failures through a post he called ‘a builders journey.’ His motive, however was to put into the limelight the lessons he has learned and the challenges he has experienced through his journey in testing a variety of projects in the NFT space.
He went ahead to say that every experience comes with its lesson while discussing his past failures with different projects in the space. The post, however, attracted a series of mixed reactions after he revealed his association with three NFT projects that he later abandoned after their failure.
Azuki NFTs founder accusations
CryptoPhunks, Tendies, and CryptoZunks that he founded did not work to his expectations. His connection to the three failed projects has in a big way affected the price of the Azuki NFT collection fell by almost 50% in Ethereum terms leading to massive losses.
Before the revelation, as per flips.finance, the price was around 20 Ethereum. After the revelation, the prices greatly dropped to roughly 11.1 Ethereum before struggling to gain momentum to its current 16.1 Ethereum.
In his defense, Zagabond says he decided to hand over CryptoPunks after it was hit with a DMCA takedown request from Larva Labs, the CryptoPunks creator. This statement was, however, contradicted by the NFT community. More accusations arose after news emerged on the ‘wash trade’ issue. this type of trading involves market deception in which someone buys and sells a financial instrument simultaneously to significantly raise its price, which is prohibited in traditional markets.
As if that is not enough, NFT enthusiasts identified as 2070 claimed that Zagabond, bearishly abandoned Tendies-his second project. Azuki, the founder in his defense said that there had given their best for the project to gain traction. 2070 disputed this claim since he was in the Tendies mint, claiming everything ceased abruptly.
Zagabond also revealed that he was involved in CryptoZunks. In this project, he was involved in questionable strategies to popularize the NFT. He allegedly presented himself as a woman to win more attention ahead of CryptoZunks launch. As per screenshots trending on Twitter, he named himself ‘Amanda’ and went ahead to update a picture of a woman in his profile.
Zagabond, contradicted all the accusations from the community, saying that the projects were more of failed experiments rather than scams as they wanted to put it.
Currently, the Azuki collection is trading around 28% lower on the day in Ethereum terms and roughly 50% lower than its all-time high floor price of 33.7 Ethereum recorded on April 2. Furthermore, the price drop is even more pronounced in US dollar terms, with Ethereum’s market value falling from around $3,500 to just over $2,400 at press time
