Despite a 15-minute sell out, secondary prices have already dropped below minting price.
Blue-chip NFT project Azuki dropped its hotly-anticipated Elementals collection yesterday, raising $38 million in 15 minutes. The collection featured new 20,000 Ethereum profile pictures (PFPs), half of which were airdropped for free to existing holders.
The remaining 10,000 sold out in the presale at a price of 2 ETH a piece.
Despite the quick sell-out, prices are already sinking, with a number of Elementals already trading on secondary market OpenSea for 1.7 ETH. The overall floor of Azuki has also dropped from around 17 ETH on June 24 to 9.45 ETH today, according to NFT Floor Price.
Collectors have taken to Twitter to express their disappointment in the artwork, which was revealed after the mint. The general consensus is that the new collection is too similar to the original PFPs, and that the quality was on the whole not worth the hefty price tag.
One person wrote, “Did Azuki just raise $40 million to release the Walmart version of Azuki?”, while others pointed out that some of the pieces had imperfections:
Azuki isn’t the only blue-chip NFT collection to take a hit over the past seven days. Last weekend was particularly tumultuous for Bored Ape Yacht Club, with its floor price sinking from approximately 45 ETH on June 17 to 33.9 ETH on June 24.
The volatility was traced back to Jeffrey Huang, aka ‘Machi Big Brother’, who sold over 50 Apes on Blur in one weekend. On the Saturday, Huang flogged 19 NFTs in one transaction for 651 Ether (~$1.2 million).
Azuki is one of Web3’s most successful NFT brands. Since its 2022 debut, the collection has accumulated a trading volume of more than $1 billion on OpenSea.
With price declines in both Bored Ape and Azuki, a case can be made that the PFP era of poor-utility JPEGs is coming to an end. Instead, the market appears to be shifting toward utility projects that offer holders real life services beyond digital art.
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