🚨Azuki Is In Trouble🚨
The Azuki really messed up with the launch of their new collection, Elementals. Let’s see a timeline of what happened and talk about what’s next for the NFT project.
📢 The Announcement: On the 23rd of June, 2023, Azuki first announced the launch of their new collection, Elementals. Also, 10k of the NFTs from the new collection were airdropped to existing Azuki holders at the event hosted in Las Vegas and called “Follow the Rabbit.”
💥 The Release: On the 27th of June, 2023, Azuki started the auction of their brand-new NFTs. The collection sold out in just 15 minutes, pulling off exactly 20k $ETH. The 10k NFTs put up for sale via a Dutch auction format were sold at a price of 2 $ETH apiece.
🚩The Problems: On the 28th of June, 2023, after just a day from the auction, people started noticing that something was off with the collection. Multiple holders stated that some of the new NFTs look too similar to the Azuki collection, released in February 2022, despite Elementals initially having a different branding story. The price of both collections slid by more than 40%.
😔 The Apology: Starting with the 29th of June, 2023, the Azuki team tackled the problem and tried to somehow mediate the wrath of the crypto community. Multiple senior managers have written their apologies, stating technical problems while minting, and much more.
⚖️ The Lawsuit: On 2nd of July, 2023, the Azuki DAO put up a proposal to sue the founder of the collection. If approved, the Azuki DAO proposal would mandate a lawyer to file a lawsuit against the pseudonymous Azuki founder, Zagabond, on grounds of rugging multiple projects. The proposal also seeks a refund from the sale proceeds, with the funds allocated toward promoting the project's growth and supporting preliminary research for the legal case.
⚔️ The Attack: On the 3rd of July, 2023, AzukiDao's governance token contract has been exploited due to a contract vulnerability. So far, two attackers were able to exploit the vulnerability and made a profit of 35 $ETH.
🤷♂️ What’s Next?
While the attack might set off the lawsuit for a while, the Azuki community is too enraged to let this go away. The company behind the mint, Chiru Labs, pulled off 20k $ETH for the entire collection. Now, the entire collection is worth almost half the price it was worth just 6 days ago.
It is highly probable that the community will get their lawsuit going and the company will have to pay up an expensive settlement…
