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NFTs-Trading Volumes Spike on Azuki NFTs After Creator Admits to Failed Projects

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What are Azuki NFTs? 

NFTs-Azuki is a digital brand mostly associated with its collection of 10,000 avatars

Who’s Behind Azuki NFTs?

Behind Azuki NFTs is Churi Labs, a startup composed of several members with vast experience in crypto, art, and gaming, all of them joining forces to bring a recognizable brand to the metaverse.

Azuki NFT Floor Price: How it Started and How it Goes

The Azuki collection debuted on January 12, 2022, with an initial release of 8,700 avatars — each priced at $3,400 at that time.The collection sold out in a matter of minutes, registering about $30 million in sales. After the public sale, the creators held a private offering in which they sold sets of Azuki NFTs for another $2 million.

Why Are Azukies So Popular?

There are plenty of reasons why Azuki became a blue chip in the cryptocurrency community in such a quick fashion. Number one, in the eyes of most people, is art. It occupied an important niche within the field of NFTs – anime – and it set the standard for hundreds of projects after it. The Avatars are aesthetically pleasant, and in the words of Zagabond – it just “resonates” with the audience, especially in Asia, where anime is a lot more popular.

Creator Admits to Failed Projects

An anime-inspired NFT collection of avatars, Azuki, had been serving up some stiff competition among industry-leading collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Clone X since the project’s January launch. The digital collectibles, whose prices are plummeting, are now at the forefront of the latest NFT (non-fungible token) controversy.Azuki’s founder, known as Zagabond, published a blog post about his history prior to launching Azuki, revealing he was behind three NFT collections — CryptoPhunks, Tendies and CryptoZunks — that were abandoned by their founders. In response, many Twitter users dubbed the projects rug pulls or scams that were never intended to be built.

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NFT Market Collapses Just As Square EnixSells Tomb Raider To Bet Big On Blockchain

You know what no one could ever have predicted?

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That a market based on imaginary ownership of infinitely duplicable jpeg images might not be end-game, long-term sustainable. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the NFT market is “flatlining,” down 92 percent from last September. Which makes it just the most incredible time for Japanese publisher Square Enix, famed for properties like Final Fantasy, to sell off most of their Western-facing IP and studios to gamble on the batshit scheme.

blockchain market

Square Enix is intending to sell Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal and Square Enix Montreal to the monolithic The Embracer Group, along with IPs for games like Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Thief, and Legacy of Kain. Why? Because, to quote Squenix, “the Transaction enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including blockchain, AI, and the cloud.” Which is to say, its previously announced desire to milk the NFT/blockchain market.

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feel like the most extraordinarily precise emblem of the 2020s. It’s all a glaringly obvious pile of bullshit. Companies are literally selling a line of code on what they call a blockchain, to repackage the extremely old idea of digital asset ownership as the next big investment you should get in on now while the going is good. You’ve been able to own things like video game skins for a long time, of course. Somehow, though, many of these companies are putting a lot of effort into pretending that you can now own a picture, and then pretending that in doing so the picture somehow becomes imbued with inherent worth—all given life by enough idiots clapping their hands and shouting how they believe in fairies.

If not, well, I’ve got these lovely jpegs of some bridges I could sell them.

NFTs were always going to be a bubble, and no doubt they’ll have little spikes, resurgences of interest with each new nonsensical twist, reaching nowhere near as high as 2021’s but allowing the True Believers to keep duping themselves and others for a while to come. But let’s hope that this news of a market collapse is finally enough to scare the games industry away from this ludicrous money pit. We’ve reached out to Square Enix to ask if the news has given them any pause.

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NFT-Ukraine Asks Crypto Exchanges to Freeze All Russian

NFT news:
Ukraine Asks Crypto Exchanges to Freeze All Russian Users’ Accounts – Major Exchanges Deny Requests.
Ebay CEO talks NFT and crypto, Exec says company continues to ‘evaluate other forms of payment’.
Bitcoin climbs to $41K and flippens the Russian ruble

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NFT-based fantasy football card firm raises $680m

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NFT–French firm Sorare, which sells football trading cards in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has raised $680m (£498m).

The NFT-based cards are used by fans to create fantasy football teams which can then “play” each other.

The funding was led by tech investor Softbank, with ex-England international Rio Ferdinand also putting in money.

NFTs are controversial, with concerns over financial risk and environmental impact.

An NFT is a “one-of-a-kind” digital asset that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property.

As with crypto-currency, a record of who owns what is stored on a shared ledger known as the blockchain and maintained by thousands of computers around the world.

Players can buy cards from Sorare at auctions, or fans can also auction cards they own to other players.

Sorare claims $150m worth of cards have been traded on the platform since January. The latest investment puts its value at $4.3bn (£3.15bn).

As NFTs, the cards can also be sold on platforms such as OpenSea and Rarible.

Sorare says it has partnerships with more than 180 football clubs and has 600,000 registered users.

A number of players including Spain’s Gerard Pique and France’s Antoine Griezmann also invested in the company.

The firm recently announced a deal with Spain’s La Liga and told the Telegraph it hoped to have “something to announce” about the Premier League.

Fan crypto

Some journalists, charities and fan organisations have begun to question if crypto-assets and sports mix.

Sorare isn’t the only business to have deals with clubs featuring crypto-based assets.

Clubs such as Barcelona, Juventus, Manchester City and Paris St-Germain already have arrangements with a firm called Socios to sell crypto-currency-based fan-tokens.

The firm promotes tokens on its website as a way to “influence decisions of your favourite teams, unlock VIP rewards and access to exclusive promotions, games, chat & a superfan recognition”.

But because the tokens can be traded, some fan organisations worry clubs are encouraging speculation in crypto-currencies.

Leeds United Supporters’ Trust, for example, was critical of the club’s decision to reach an agreement with Socios saying fans would be entering a “crypto-currency ecosystem, something which many may have very little knowledge of”.

“If football chooses to bring unregulated crypto-currency into the game, we believe that clubs also need to provide education and guidance on the purpose and risks associated.”

NFT worries

NFTs are also controversial.

Depending on the technology used, maintaining a blockchain requires considerable computing power with a sizeable carbon footprint.

As in traditional investing, financial impropriety and crime are a risk, but the protections for consumers are generally less robust.

There are also concerns about a lack of regulation.

Recently OpenSea, the largest digital collectable marketplace, revealed an employee used inside knowledge to buy NFTs before they were promoted on the website.

CEO Devin Finzer said the incident was “incredibly disappointing” and did not represent the team’s values.

Insider trading – where individuals use non-public knowledge about a company for financial advantage – is illegal in most regulated markets.

But the NFT market does not have such restrictions.

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