Behind Azuki's surge against the trend: cross-border interaction with traditional platforms Bilibili and Line Friends

Original article: "Frequently teaming up with big IPs such as Bilibili and Line Friends, can Azuki solve the NFT growth dilemma?"
Author: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher
Recently, the NFT market has seen more negative news than positive news. First, the floor price of the leading NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) series was reported to have fallen to 52.59 ETH, the lowest point in five months; then, the two earliest NFT OG players "Franklin" and "Ma Ji Da Ge Huang Licheng" recently announced their retirement, making the already cold NFT market even worse.
However, Azuki's performance in the secondary market does not seem to be affected by these negative news. The floor price and trading volume seem to be going against the current, and its trading volume and activity have surpassed BAYC many times.
According to CryptoSlam data, in the past 7 days, Azuki's trading volume was 10.37 million US dollars, ranking second, less than 1 million away from the first-ranked BAYC (trading volume of 12.66 million), and even surpassed BAYC in 24-hour trading volume many times, ranking first. In addition, the floor price of the Azuki series NFT is also rising steadily, with an increase of about 21% in the past 7 days, and now it is 15.89 ETH (about 30,000 US dollars).
Why has Azuki performed so well recently?
We may be able to see clues from the trend of Azuki floor price changes. On April 12, Azuki announced a partnership with IP company Line Friends to create Beanz NFT IP, and the Azuki and Beanz NFT floor prices rose sharply before and after this.
The cooperation between Azuki and Line Friends is a major benefit, which can help its NFT go viral and increase brand awareness. However, some users are worried that it will follow in the footsteps of the cooperation with Bilibili and end up with nothing in the future.
Cooperating with Line Friends to create Beanz IP, Azuki floor prices rose against the trend
On April 12, Azuki announced that its developer Chiru Labs has established a strategic partnership with IPX, the parent company of Line Friends, a well-known Korean IP company, to jointly create the Beanz NFT IP.
Line Friends was originally a cartoon image package for chat conversations provided by the social software Line. Later, it developed into an IP operation platform IP, creating well-known IP images such as Brown Bear, Cony Rabbit, and Sally Chicken. Its business includes offline stores, games, animations, theme parks, coffee shops, etc. In 2022, it was announced that it would be renamed "IPX", indicating that the company will focus on building a digital IP business ecosystem.
 Line Friends IP
Beanz NFT is translated as "little beans". It was launched by Chiru Labs in April 2022. Beanz is a small species that sprouts from the soil in the garden. It is given the personality of "Azuki's partner" and adds fun to Azukis with their antics. Representative members of Beanz NFT include red bean Toshi, blue bean Gus, black bean Link, lentil Tao, coffee bean Johny C, etc. Each little bean has a different image in terms of clothing, headdress, shoes, hand props, etc. The total issuance of this series is 20,000, of which 10,000 will be airdropped to Azuki NFT holders.
 Beanz NFT
It can be seen that Azuki and Beanz have become the two main NFT brands of Chiru Labs. Although the Beanz series is far less well-known than Azuki, judging from the cooperation with IPX, Beanz will become an important operating brand of the team.
Chiru Labs and IPX plan to collaborate through their respective assets to jointly launch some content, products and activities, such as some Beanz-themed doll products may be sold in Line Friends retail stores.
The first collaboration will feature Line Friends characters fused with Beanz, with the new best friend characters named "Jay" and "Jelly" launched by Beanz in February becoming the focus of this collaboration.
To celebrate this collaboration, Chiru Labs and IPX jointly launched “kigu gear” with Line Friends elements—Brown bear, Sally hooded sweatshirt, etc. Beanz NFT holders can wear these clothes on their NFT images to show a new Beanz image.
Beanz NFT wearing Line Friends elements
In addition, the two companies will start playing Beanz-related animated shorts on the video billboard above the Line Friends store in Times Square, New York, from the date of the collaboration.
This move has led users to speculate that Azuki may have more commercial activities with Line Friends in the future, such as expanding to other cooperative IP characters, or even jointly launching some dolls, which is a huge benefit for the two major NFTs, Azuki and Beanz.
Influenced by this news, according to NFTGO, Beanz NFT's trading volume soared 512.5% ​​in 24 hours that day, the floor price exceeded 1.54ETH, and the highest reached 1.78ETH, an increase of more than 10%; Azuki NFT's trading volume surged 350%, and the floor price reached 14.7ETH.
As of April 21, Beanz has a market value of $58.61 million, a floor price of 1.5 ETH, or about $2,925, a 24-hour trading volume of $1.13 million, and 7,385 holding addresses. Azuki has a market value of $370 million.
The results of the cooperation with Bilibili are dismal. Can Azuki solve the NFT growth dilemma through cross-border cooperation?
Cross-border cooperation with the brand Line Friends is not the first exploration of Azuki. Before this, Azuki has frequently appeared on domestic Web2 Internet platforms, such as cooperating with Bilibili and entering Xiaohongshu.
In January this year, Azuki officially announced a partnership with Bilibili International to explore Web3 innovations in animation and media content. Holders of Cheers up, an NFT project authorized by Azuki, Beanz, and Bilibili International, will unlock exclusive benefits, allowing users to replace their avatars with the NFTs they hold and receive diamond tags, so they can find Azuki's like-minded people on Bilibili. In addition, Cheers UP and Beanz have jointly designed an emoji package of related elements for holders to use in comments and Discord in the Bilibili application.
At the time, Azuki's cooperation with Bilibili was considered a good opportunity for the brand to go viral, and it received a lot of support from users. However, as the CheerUp NFT project faded, Bilibili's resource support for Azuki also disappeared. Now, no information related to Azuki can be found on Bilibili's international website.
Prior to this, in December last year, Azuki’s Chinese community “Red Bean Garden” announced that it had opened an account on Xiaohongshu, where R-Space, a digital collection on Xiaohongshu, would provide relevant resource support. For example, Azuki NFT holders can set their avatars as NFT images and display their NFTs in the digital collection space R-Space on their personal homepage. Although it is not Azuki’s official account, it attracted a lot of user attention in the early stages of the cooperation with the support of Xiaohongshu’s official resources. However, as the domestic digital collection market cooled, user attention also declined. The last content update time of the Xiaohongshu account of the Azuki Chinese community was on January 23 this year.
Judging from the final operation results of Azuki's cross-border cooperation with Web2 platforms such as Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, it is not satisfactory. Users doubt whether the cooperation with Line Friends will follow the footsteps of the cooperation with Bilibili, which started well but ended badly. However, some users have different opinions on this. Regardless of the results of the cooperation, the Azuki project has at least been exploring new ways of empowerment. This spirit is worth learning for every NFT project.
The main reason behind Azuki's frequent cross-border collaborations is that the NFT market is cold and user growth is stagnant. It attempts to make NFT popular by cooperating with Web2 companies, extending virtual Web3 projects to the real world and attracting more potential users.
At present, due to the bear market in the crypto market, the heat of the NFT market has dropped to freezing point. The floor prices of blue-chip projects such as Moonbird, CoolCat, and Doodles have continued to fall. Although there was a brief rebound when good news was released, it still could not reverse the downward trend. According to NFTGo's BlueChip Index, the index has been on a downward trend since its high of 14,526 in April 2022, and is currently below 8,000 points. As of April 21, the market value of NFT was US$22 billion, which has shrunk by 36% compared to the peak of US$34 billion. The NFT market transaction volume in the past 30 days was US$1.27 billion, a month-on-month decrease of 34.8%.
In addition, well-known physical companies that had previously announced their support for the development of NFT or the Metaverse have also begun to cut related business budgets. For example, at the end of March, Disney announced the layoffs of all members of its Metaverse department; Meta's Facebook and Instagram social platforms officially stopped supporting NFT displays on April 11.
When the bubble fades, users will pay more attention to the value of NFT itself and the way to empower resources. In the case of stagnant development of the NFT market, NFT projects need to find ways to save themselves if they want to maintain their blue chip status, such as issuing tokens or new NFTs.
On April 18, Moonbirds NFT announced the launch of TALONS, a reward token that NFT holders can accumulate every day through "nesting". In the future, tokens will be used to bid for whitelists, exclusive merchandise benefits, etc. On April 21, Cool Cats announced the launch of a new ecological NFT series "Shadow Wolves", which is classified as a "Super Cool" member and is an extension of the Cool Cats ecosystem.
However, the floor price of Moonbird did not change on the day the news was announced, but instead showed a downward trend, now at 2.9ETH; the floor price of Cool Cats also fell, now at 0.8ETH. Judging from the market attention, floor price and transaction volume changes of these NFT projects, community users are not buying it.
How to break the dilemma of emotional pull and truly achieve sustained growth remains a difficult problem that NFT project parties and community users need to face in the long term.